My Garden Acquaintance | Page 4

domesticated for thirty years. It is clear
that he fell in love with it at first sight. We have no means of tracing
the growth of his passion; but in 1780 we find him eloping with its
object in a post- chaise. "The rattle and hurry of the journey so
perfectly roused it that, when I turned it out in a border, it walked twice
down to the bottom of my garden." It reads like a Court Journal:
"Yesterday morning H.R.H. the Princess Alice took an airing of half an
hour on the terrace of Windsor Castle." This tortoise might have been a
member of the Royal Society, if he could have condescended to so
ignoble an ambition. It had but just been discovered that a surface
inclined at a certain angle with the plane of the horizon took more of
the sun's rays. The tortoise had always known this (though he
unostentatiously made no parade of it), and used accordingly to tilt
himself up against the garden-wall in the autumn. He seems to have
been more of a philosopher than even Mr. White himself, caring for
nothing but to get under a cabbage-leaf when it rained, or the sun was
too hot, and to bury himself alive before frost,--a four-footed Diogenes,
who carried his tub on his back.
There are moods in which this kind of history is infinitely refreshing.
These creatures whom we affect to look down upon as the drudges of
instinct are members of a commonwealth whose constitution rests on
immovable bases. never any need of reconstruction there! *They*
never dream of settling it by vote that eight hours are equal to ten, or
that one creature is as clever as another and no more. *They* do not
use their poor wits in regulating God's clocks, nor think they cannot go
astray so long as they carry their guide-board about with them,--a
delusion we often practise upon ourselves with our high and mighty

reason, that admirable finger-post which points every way and always
right. It is good for us now and then to converse with a world like Mr.
White's, where Man is the least important of animals. But one who, like
me, has always lived in the country and always on the same spot, is
drawn to his book by other occult sympathies. Do we not share his
indignation at that stupid Martin who had graduated his thermometer
no lower than 4o above zero of Fahrenheit, so that in the coldest
weather ever known the mercury basely absconded into the bulb, and
left us to see the victory slip through our fingers, just as they were
closing upon it? No man, I suspect, ever lived long in the country
without being bitten by these meteorological ambitions. He likes to be
hotter and colder, to have been more deeply snowed up, to have more
trees and larger blow down than his neighbors. With us descendants of
the Puritans especially, these weather- competitions supply the
abnegated excitement of the race-course. Men learn to value
thermometers of the true imaginative termperament, capable of
prodigious elations and corresponding dejections. The other day (5th
July) I marked 98o in the shade, my high water mark, higher by one
degree than I had ever seen it before. I happened to meet a neighbor; as
we mopped our brows at each other, he told me that he had just cleared
100o, and I went home a beaten man. I had not felt the heat before,
save as a beautiful exaggeration of sunshine; but now it oppressed me
with the prosaic vulgarity of an oven. What had been poetic intensity
became all at once rhetorical hyperbole. I might suspect his
thermometer (as indeed I did, for we Harvard men are apt to think ill of
any graduation but our own); but it was a poor consolation. The fact
remained that his herald Mercury, standing a tiptoe, could look down
on mine. I seem to glimpse something of this familiar weakness in Mr.
White. He, too, has shared in these mercurial triumphs and defeats. Nor
do I doubt that he had a true country- gentleman's interest in the
weather-cock; that his first question on coming down of a morning was,
like Barabas's,
"Into what quarter peers my halcyon's bill?"
It is an innocent and healthful employment of the mind, distracting one
from too continual study of himself, and leading him to dwell rather

upon the indigestions of the elements than his own. "Did the wind back
round, or go about with the sun?" is a rational question that bears not
remotely on the making of hay and the prosperity of crops. I have little
doubt that the regulated observation of the vane in many different
places, and the interchange of results by telegraph, would put the