a cheerful air,
I knew that he was a resident of Chicago; if I saw a man with a long
face, I knew that he represented a Hartford insurance company.
[Laughter.] Really, the cheerful resignation with which the Chicago
people endured the losses of New England did honor to human nature.
[Laughter.]

Perhaps it is well that New England is not yet more sterile, for it
would have owned the whole of the country, and would have monopolized
all the wealth, as it has confessedly got a corner on all the virtues.

And while the narrow limit of the season, called by courtesy "summer,"
has enforced promptness and rapidity of action, the long winters have
given pause for reflection, have fostered the red school-house, have
engendered reading and discussion, have made her sons and her daughters
thoughtful beings.

The other day, in reading the life of a New England woman,[8] I met with
a letter written when she was seventeen years old: "I have begun reading
Dugald Stewart. How are my sources of enjoyment multiplied. By bringing
into view the various systems of philosophers concerning the origin of
our knowledge, he enlarges the mind, and extends the range of our ideas,
... while clearly distinguishing between proper objects of inquiry and
those that must forever remain inexplicable to man in the present state
of his faculties. Reasonings from induction are delightful." [Laughter.]

I think you will agree with me that only where there was a long winter,
and long winter evenings, would such a letter be written by a girl in
her teens.

The question has often been asked why there are so many poets in New
England. A traveller passing through Concord inquired, "How do all these
people support themselves?" The answer was, "They all live by writing
poems for 'The Atlantic Monthly.'" [Laughter.]

Now, any one who thinks of it must see that it is the weather which
makes all these poets, or rather the weathers, for there are so many. As
Mr. Choate said: "Cold to-day, hot to-morrow; mercury at eighty in the
morning, with wind at southeast; and in three hours more a sea-turn,
wind at east, a thick fog from the bottom of the ocean, and a fall of
forty degrees; now, so dry as to kill all the beans in New Hampshire;
then, a flood, carrying off the bridges on the Penobscot; snow in
Portsmouth in July, and the next day a man and a yoke of oxen killed by
lightning down in Rhode Island." [Laughter.]

The commonplace question: "How is the weather g