. I like to hear
rain on a tin roof. So I covered part of my roof with tin, with an eye
to that luxury. Well, sir, do you think it ever rains on that tin? No,
sir; skips it every time. Mind, in this speech I have been trying merely
to do honor to the New England weather--no language could do it justice.
But, after all, there is at least one or two things about that weather
(or, if you please, effects produced, by it) which we residents would
not like to part with. If we hadn't our bewitching autumn foliage,
we should still have to credit the weather with one feature which
compensates for all its bullying vagaries--the ice-storm: when a
leafless tree is clothed with ice from the bottom to the top--ice that
is as bright and clear as crystal; when every bough and twig is strung
with ice-beads, frozen dewdrops, and the whole tree sparkles cold and
white, like the Shah of Persia's diamond plume. Then the wind waves the
branches and the sun comes out and turns all those myriads of beads and
drops to prisms that glow and burn and flash with all manner of colored
fires, which change and change again with inconceivable rapidity from
blue to red, from red to green, and green to gold--the tree becomes a
spraying fountain, a very explosion of dazzling jewels; and it stands
there the acme, the climax, the supremest possibility in art or nature,
of bewildering, intoxicating, intolerable magnificence. One cannot make
the words too strong.

CONCERNING THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE --

[Being part of a chapter which was
crowded out of "A Tramp Abroad."--M.T.]

There was as Englishman in our compartment, and he complimented me
on--on what? But you would never guess. He complimented me on my
English. He said Americans in general did not speak the English language
as correctly as I did. I said I was obliged to him for his compliment,
since I knew he meant it for one, but that I was not fairly entitled to
it, for I did not speak English at all--I only spoke American.

He laughed, and said it was a distinction without a difference. I said
no, the difference was not prodigious, but still it was considerable. We
fell into a friendly dispute over the matter. I put my case as well as I
could, and said:--

"The languages were identical several generations ago, but our changed
conditions and the spread of our people far to the south and far to
the west have made many alterations in our pronunciation, and have
introduced new words among