Samuel L. Clemens (Mark Twain) replied as follows:--

I reverently believe that the Maker who made us all makes everything in
New England but the weather. I don't know who makes that, but I think
it must be raw apprentices in the weather-clerk's factory who experiment
and learn how, in New England, for board and clothes, and then are
promoted to make weather for countries that require a good article,
and will take their custom elsewhere if they don't get it. There is
a sumptuous variety about the New England weather that compels the
stranger's admiration--and regret. The weather is always doing something
there; always attending strictly to business; always getting up new
designs and trying them on the people to see how they will go. But it
gets through more business in spring than in any other season. In the
spring I have counted one hundred and thirty-six different kinds of
weather inside of four-and-twenty hours. It was I that made the fame
and fortune of that man that had that marvelous collection of weather on
exhibition at the Centennial, that so astounded the foreigners. He
was going to travel all over the world and get specimens from all the
climes. I said, "Don't you do it; you come to New England on a favorable
spring day." I told him what we could do in the way of style, variety,
and quantity. Well, he came and he made his collection in four days. As
to variety, why, he confessed that he got hundreds of kinds of weather
that he had never heard of before. And as to quantity--well, after he
had picked out and discarded all that was blemished in any way, he not
only had weather enough, but weather to spare; weather to hire out;
weather to sell; to deposit; weather to invest; weather to give to the
poor. The people of New England are by nature patient and forbearing,
but there are some things which they will not stand. Every year they
kill a lot of poets for writing about "Beautiful Spring." These are
generally casual visitors, who bring their notions of spring from
somewhere else, and cannot, of course, know how the natives feel about
spring. And so the first thing they know the opportunity to inquire
how they feel has permanently gone by. Old Probabilities has a mighty
reputation for accurate prophecy, and thoroughly well deserves it. You
take up the paper and observe how crisply and confidently he checks off
what to-day's weather is going to be on the Pacific, down South, in the
Middle States, in the Wisconsin r