I hunted up statistics, and was amazed to find that less than THREE HUNDRED people had really lost their lives by railroad disasters in the preceding twelve months. The Erie road was the most murderous in the list. It had killed forty-six – or twenty-six, I do not exactly remember which, but I know the number was double that of any other road. But the Erie was an immensely long road, and did more business than any other line in the country.

By further figuring, it appeared that between New York and Rochester the Erie ran eight passenger-trains each way every day – 16 altogether; and carried a daily average of 6,000 persons. That is about a million in six months – the population of New York City. Well, the Erie kills from 13 to 23 persons of ITS million in six months. At the same time 13,000 of New York’s million die in their beds! My hair stood on end. “This is terrible!” I said. “The danger isn’t in traveling by rail, but in trusting to those deadly beds. I will never sleep in a bed again.”

I had figured further that an average of 2,500 passengers a day for each road in the country would be almost correct. There are 846 railway lines in our country, and 846 times 2,500 are 2,115,000.[11] So the railways of America move more than two millions of people every day; six hundred and fifty millions of people a year, without counting the Sundays. They do that, too – there is no question about it; though where they get the raw material is clear beyond the jurisdiction of my arithmetic, as I find that there are not that many people in the United States. They must use some of the same people over again, likely.

There are 500 deaths a week in New York and 60 deaths a week in San Francisco. That is 3,120 deaths a year in San Francisco, and eight times as many in New York – say about 25,000 or 26,000. The health of the two places is the same. So we will let it stand as a fair presumption that this will hold good all over the country, and that 25,000 out of every million of people we have must die every year. That is one-fortieth of our total population. One million of us, then, die every year. Out of this million ten or twelve thousand are stabbed, shot, drowned, hanged, poisoned, or meet a similarly violent death in some other popular way, such as perishing by kerosene-lamp, getting buried in coal-mines, falling off house-tops, taking patent medicines, or committing suicide in other forms. The Erie railroad kills 23 to 46; the other 845 railroads kill an average of one-third of a man each; and the rest of that million – 987,631 corpses – die naturally in their beds!

You will excuse me from taking any more chances on those beds. The railroads are good enough for me.

And my advice to all people is, Don’t stay at home any more than you can help; but when you have GOT to stay at home a while, buy a package of those insurance tickets and sit up nights. You cannot be too cautious.

The moral of this composition is, that people grumble more than is fair about railroad management in the United States. When we consider that every day and night of the year full fourteen thousand railway-trains of various kinds go over the land, the marvel is, NOT that they kill three hundred human beings a year, but that they do not kill nine hundred thousand!

I 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, and then are either promoted to make weather for other countries or go elsewhere. There is a unique variety about the New England weather that makes any stranger admire – and regret it. The weather is always doing something there; 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 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 fortune of that man that had that marvelous collection of weather on one exhibition, that so amazed the foreigners. One of them was going to travel all over the world and see all the kinds of climates. I said, “Don’t do it; just come to New England on a spring day.” I told him what he would be pleased with 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, he not only had weather enough, but 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, 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.

The weather forecaster Old Probabilities has a mighty reputation for accurate prophecy, and thoroughly well deserves it. You take up the paper and observe how confidently he checks off what today’s weather is going to be on the Pacific, down South, in the Middle States, in the Wisconsin region till he gets to New England. He doesn’t know what the weather is going to be in New England. Well, by and by he gets out something about like this: Probable northeast to southwest winds, varying to the southward and westward and eastward, high and low barometer swapping around from place to place; probable areas of rain, snow, hail, and drought, succeeded or preceded by earthquakes, with thunder and lightning. Then he writes down this postscript, to cover accidents: “But it is possible that the program may be wholly changed in the meantime.”

Yes, one of the brightest gems in the New England weather is the uncertainty of it. There is only one thing certain about it: you are certain there is going to be plenty of it; but you never can tell how it is going to start. You prepare for the drought; you leave your umbrella in the house, and two to one you get drowned. You make up your mind that the earthquake is likely to come; you take hold of something to steady yourself, and the first thing you know you get struck by lightning. These are great disappointments; but they can’t be helped.

The lightning there is peculiar. And the thunder. When the thunder begins to merely tune up and scrape, and tune up the instruments for the performance, strangers say, “Why, what awful thunder you have here!” But when the baton is raised and the real concert begins, you’ll find that stranger hiding in the cellar.

Now as to the size of the weather in New England, it is utterly disproportioned to the size of that little country. Half the time, when it is packed as full as it can stick, you will see that New England weather sticking out beyond the edges and spreading around hundreds and hundreds of miles over the neighboring states. She can’t hold a tenth part of her weather.

I could speak volumes about the mysteries of the New England weather, but I will give but a single example now. I like to hear rain on a tin roof. So I covered part of my roof with tin. 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 to do honor to the New England weather.

But, after all, there is at least one or two things about that weather (or, if you please, effects produced, by it) which we would not like to part with. For example, there are these ice-storms, when a leafless tree is in ice from the bottom to the top – ice that is as bright and clear as crystal; when every branch and twig is in ice-beads, and the whole tree sparkles cold and white. Then the wind waves the branches and the sun comes out and turns all those myriads of beads to prisms that glow and flash like colored fires, which change and change again from blue to red, from red to green, and green to gold – the tree becomes a fountain of amazing jewels. It stands there the supremest possibility in art or nature of bewildering, intoxicating magnificence. One cannot make the words too strong.