he case could be pleaded. What
a frightful total of damages would be run up against the defendant if
every plaintiff got a proper verdict! For, besides all the injuries
inflicted on mankind by "accident," which only means the Lord's malice
or neglect, it is a solemn fact (on the Theist's hypothesis) that God
has killed every man, woman, and child that ever died since the human
race began. We are born here without being consulted, and hurried away
without the least regard to our convenience.

But let us keep to the weather. A gentleman who was feeding the fish at
sea heard a sailor singing "Britannia rules the waves." "Does she?" he
groaned, "Then I wish she'd rule them straighter." Most of us might as
fervently wish that the Lord ruled the weather better. Some parts of
the world are parched and others flooded. In some places the crops are
spoiled with too much sun, and in others with too little. Some people
sigh for the sight of a cloud, and others people see nothing else.
Occasionally a famine occurs in India which might have been averted by
half our superfluity of water. Even at home the weather is always more
or less of a plague. Its variation is so great that it is always a safe
topic of conversation. You may go out in the morning with a light heart,
tempted by the sunshine to leave your overcoat and umbrella at home; and
in the evening you may return wet through, with a sensation in the nose
that prognosticates a doctor's bill. You may enter a theatre, or a hall,
with dry feet, and walk home through a deluge. In the morning a south
wind breathes like zephyr on your cheeks, and in the evening your face
is pinched with a vile and freezing northeaster.

"Oh," say the pious, "it would be hard to please everybody, and foolish
to try it. Remember the old man and his ass." Perhaps so, but the Lord
should have thought of that before he made us; and if he cannot give us
all we want, he might show us a little consideration now and then. But
instead of occasionally accommodating the weather to us, he invariably
makes us accommodate ourselves to the weather. That is, if we can. But
we cannot, at any rate in a climate like this. Men cannot be walking
almanacks, nor carry about a wardrobe to suit all contingencies. In the
long run the weather gets the better of the wisest and toughest, and
when the doctors have done with us we head our own funeral procession.
The doctor's certificate says asthma, bronchitis, pulmonary consumptio