181

SEASONABLE WEATHER.

I HAVE never crossed the Line. Though I have been within hail of the Southern Cross; seen rain come down, not in bucketfuls, but 'strings' (which they say marks the downpour of the tropics); gazed in amazement almost incredulous at the Canadian Aurora Borealis, and stood under an African midnight sky full of stars bigger and more luminous than planets, or lit with a moon which showed the smallest print-I know nothing (except from hearsay) about the heats, colds, winds, calms, clouds, and sunshine of another hemisphere. I perceive, however, a deeper meaning than he probably intended to convey in the remark of an American visitor when he was asked what he thought about English weather, and replied, 'Waal, sir, I guess you have only samples. He intended to express his sense of that pervading inferiority which characterises all British possessions or experience, and yet he hit on one peculiarity of our insular position which makes the British climate unique. He was right. Few though our square miles may be, they show meteorological specimens of every sort. We cannot, indeed, boast of a blizzard (Yankee, I suppose, for 'blows hard"), which sweeps a region three thousand miles in width; but half an acre of it is enough in an eastern county, when it comes straight from the Ural mountains, and any moisture it may have had has been sucked out of it by the dryness of Europe. Thus we feel the most arid airs of our own Continent, and yet, on the other hand, we have none of the juice taken out of the west wind before it begins to fall upon the Irish Coast. The raincloud which travels from America is tapped by us before it reaches our nearest neighbours, and the bitterness of a Siberian wind takes its last edge as it passes over waterless France. Even a lake might put a spoonful into it in passing, but our friends across the Channel have hardly a pond on this side of their Alps, and only add a dash of snow to the cold breezes which come to us across their fields and hills.

I had hardly taken my pen off the word 'samples,' by which our American cousins designate our scraps of weather, than I was introduced by a friend, who has visitors from all parts of the world (I once met Captain Semmes, of the Alabama,' in his com

pany), to a leading Ojibbeway Indian, who combined the dress of a clergyman with red ribbons round his neck (by which hung enormous medals commemorating I know not what), and talked English with smiling readiness and an indescribable accent. 'Sir,' said I, 'I hope you will receive pleasant impressions of our country.' 'Well,' he replied, 'I landed in this last March, and in the first fortnight of my visit saw more snow than I had seen during the whole winter in Canada.'

6

It is not often that one has so speedy a confirmation of a sentence. The Ojibbeway had seen a 'sample' of our weather, and yet it was outside ordinary British experience, and could not be taken to illustrate the real behaviour of any season that we know. The blizzard, e.g., of one awful night in winter, when we thought of men with numb-cold fingers lying out' on swaying yards, and presently heard of some frozen stiff in the rigging, when our shores were fringed with disaster, when the papers said that the Channel was full of wreckage,' and helpless railway engines as well as sheep had to be dug out of drifts, may have been a 'sample'; but the supply which it represented could not, methinks, be greeted, however pleasantly, as seasonable' by those well-clad people who smile at bitter frosts. Nevertheless, even that night did not come without results which were immediately claimed as desirable by some. One of the submerged tenth, for instance, immediately floated up, with a shovel, at my snowblocked door and flatly declined to clear the pavement before the house for less than a shilling. 'You see, sir,' he said (very civilly and with smiles of satisfaction), ''taint often we gets such a job.' So I let him do it, and, though his tool was imperfect, the whole business was over in less than half an hour, the wage pocketed, and the workman re-engaged elsewhere. Indeed, while many were full of pity for the poorest during the last long winter frost, they were not the most usually indigent who suffered most, but the steady workers at out-door trades, such as that of bricklaying. They could tide over the delay of one month, but many of them were sorely pinched when they had to stand idle for two. The loafers then reaped a fine winter harvest in sweeping ice and serving skaters. A friend happened to hear one of them, in the middle of the frost, complaining to a mate that he had earned only seven pounds in a particular week! Fact. The secretary of a well-known charitable society remarked to me that 'casuals' had never had such a season. Certainly no begging-gang was

seen, or heard to sing, in my street throughout the whole of the last long winter frost, except on the first day of its arrival, before the ice in the parks began to bear. The weather was seasonable to them, at any rate. I know that many reckon our bitter springs to be wholesome to the many and not to the few alone. When Kingsley wrote his ode to the north-east wind which 'crisps the lazy dyke, and hungers into madness every plunging pike,' we were bidden to enjoy it as 'breeding' hardy men. No doubt the inhabitants of a land swept by icy gales are likely to show robust life, but that is because they are tough to begin with. They are the survivors, not the children, of the freezing blast. The northern savage is swift and strong. He endures where the whiteface faints from fatigue. But this is no result of his individual training. It comes from the weak and sickly among his ancestors having been killed off in their youth, and before they became the progenitors of offspring feebler than themselves. I do not believe that the Red Indian feels any access of strength when the Canadian January brings seasonable weather.' He hugs himself in his blanket, and would doze over the fire in his wigwam were he not obliged to use the occasion for hunting animals, which are, in their turn, handicapped by the snow, and more accessible than in summer. Winter is one of the four seasons, and we must take it as it comes; but we cannot see that it is an occasion for the stoppage of all natural growth without suspecting that it brings a sharp trial to all that is feeble or imperfect. The strong sap which has unfolded a million leaves retires to-well, botanists could say, perhaps; anyhow, the tree, naked because its living clothes have been stripped off, waits for a time while the cold sits in judgment on all life and decides that only the hardiest shall see another year. And unless civilisation stepped in, and with tender care physicked the sickly, sending some to other climes, putting others to bed, and generally nursing the faint stores of health, we should all be as vigorous as savages, or at least as those sturdy inhabitants of the middle ages whose endurance we read of, though we do not know how many of their young children, and those that were weak and sickly among them, were inexorably disposed of. It is one of the anomalies of experience that ignorance of sanitary laws, and exposure to the risks of life, may result in the presence of a hardy race. fittest survive. The care which is now benificently bestowed upon the sick, and the artificial protection of the helpless, leave

The

us with those who would otherwise have disappeared, and who not only drag on a debilitated existence, but become in many instances the parents of children who start the business of life with a still lower account at the bank of health than their progenitors. If the science which now shields us from pernicious physical influences and backs the naturally strong, had never been reached, we who survived might all have been as lusty as the Last of the Mohicans. Do not suppose, my readers, that I admire blizzards or commend infanticide and the euthanasia of the physically useless. Power to relieve the suffering is Godgiven. A perception of the sacredness of life, whether seen in the cripple or the athlete, is divine, and behind all the result of our imperfect civilisation lies that growing desire and purpose to better the lot of the poor and needy which marks the Christian faith.

We have wandered somewhat from our original purpose, which was to consider seasonable weather,' but the side-path was a natural and legitimate one. In returning to it I ask what distinguishes each of our four conventional seasons; and it is a pleasant thought to begin with that, if we repeat their names, we always head the list with Spring,' though the almanac stubbornly insists on putting January first. We (perhaps unconsciously) recognise reserves of life in this preference. Man naturally looks forward, not back. The spring (especially ours), more often than not, comes with a sharp edge, and yet we always put it at the head of the meteorological poll. Though the seeds of future harvests may not have begun to sprout, they are there, in the ground, waiting for the signal to grow, for orders to march out and cover the field in which man yearly wages his battle with hunger. There is a significant agreement in hopefulness and indomitable pugnacity in this fixing upon the spring with which to start when we repeat the formula of sequence which expresses the four seasons. The sensuous or greedy man might prefer to begin with that in which we reap our crops, and have something tangible to speak of. And yet that comes last but one, last before all the forces of nature have gone through their summer manœuvres, or annual campaign, and retire to winter quarters. There would at once be felt a little shock of dislocation if a man were to talk of the seasons' as 'autumn, winter, spring, and summer.' Something more than a cadence of words which fits the tongue is felt in the accepted order in which we place the routine of the

year. We begin with the 'spring,' when all life is as yet unfulfilled, but full of hope; when the first fruits of resurrection are being felt, and more than the unseeing eye perceives may be seen in the primrose on the bank, when we watch the soft blade pushing itself through the hard earth without being bruised in so doing, or prepare the seed-bed for that which is to follow in its turn. All this helps to mitigate the vexation with which in March or April we look at the weathercock (though such a verification of facts is generally superfluous) and see that the wind is still in the north-east. We are disappointed for the day, but know that a good time is coming, and must shortly come. And that is a wholesome frame of mind, however brought about.

We pass into another as the seasonable weather of June and July begins to make itself felt. Then we are conscious of some reaction. The heat comes. Toil is exhaustive. We seek the shade. The long day brings longer hours of labour. Rest is not so appropriate when light gives glaring opportunities for work. The rapid progress of the summer makes imperative demands upon the husbandman to keep pace with it. A warmer sun ripens obnoxious weeds as well as the kindly fruits of the earth. Growth is around us and incessant. The expectation of spring is succeeded by the importunity of fruition. Though the final ingathering of autumn has not arrived, much produce makes its appearance which requires immediate attention. The gardener is especially active in the bedding and culture of his flowers, the sowing and thinning of his successive vegetable crops and their subsequent plucking or selling. He is busied, moreover, in the gathering of his strawberries, currants, and the like. He must lose no time over these perishable fruits. Then, too, the farmer is specially engaged. There is, e.g., the hay-harvest, which precedes that of the corn, and is accompanied by, perhaps, even greater anxieties than the later reaping of the wheat. Poetical and idle people who talk about the scents and beauty of the clover, humming with the industry of a million bees, or the artist who sketches the brown-armed mower as, like Time, with steady strides and hissing scythe, he sweeps down the helpless grass, and the conventional maidens who toss it in the sweet air (though this business is mostly done now with cunningly forked revolving machines of unsentimental iron), little appreciate the concern with which the farmer taps his barometer, watches an ominous change of wind, which has a trick of 'backing' at the wrong time, VOL. XVII. NO. 98, N.S、

9