The people of the United States are not in favour
with Nature just at present. Scarcely a day passes without a report of some considerable disaster, and two of them—the forest fires on the border of Canada, and the floods in the Mississippi—have been on a prodigious scale. One does not trust statistics in regard to such events, but the two calamities
together must have involved a loss of many millions, especially if we reckon the expenditure of labour in saving the cities, notably St. Louis. The fires, though not the floods, have extended to Canada, and have devastated whole counties, sweeping away flourishing townships as if they were little farms. We are perpetually grumbling at our climate, but Nature, which refuses us many things, is always on serious matters benign. Our tornadoes sweep away hayricks, our earthquakes stop clocks, and our fires spare cities, and seem enormous chiefly to insurance offices. Months of continuous drought are nearly unknown, and our greatest natural danger is that the increase of our population may one day overtax our water- supply. Even that we may meet by making our schemes of water-storage larger and more scientific.
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