The stars in their courses have brought us round once more to that period of the year when we are accustomed to make up our profit and loss account with the elements, and see how we have fared during the previous twelve months.
The retrospect is a gloom one, and will show, I fear, that the profit was nil , save that of learning wisdom from the most adverse experience; and that the loss was that of money, crops, rent, and all that goes to make up the sum of material prosperity, and even the little reputation for climate this country previously enjoyed. The inhabitants, if any, of the starry worlds might have seen the earth going round the sun in that lazy manner which, on the principle of least action in Nature, we are assured she adopts, like an idler determined to exert no more force than the occasion requires. But this would only apply to her course in space, for it would have been noticed that on her surface an opposite principle was at work, that seemed to endeavour to compress the utmost action into the smallest space of time, to expend the bulk of the year's rain on the summer and autumn months so as to effectually quench the heat of the sun, and to crowd the greatest number of storms into the brief space of the harvest season.
Facetious critics, in the spirit of the late Mr. Samuel Walker, have been anxiously casting their eyes across the Atlantic for a scapegoat on which to pour out their vials of meteorological wrath. We will not impatiently follow their example, nor yet attempt a Yankee forecast, but quietly examine the facts, and see how the land lies - and the water that flooded us last year.
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