Americans are always comparing their climate with that of England,
but we fancy that they take their bad weather in tumblers at a time, while we take it in teaspoonfuls. While we have weeks of disagreeable warmth they have ten days of the heat which kills, and while we snffer from heavy falls of rain or snow they have to endure blizzards which almost suspend municipal life. For the three days ending on Tues. day New York, under a storm which " beat all records," was like a besieged city cut off by snow and frost from the re- mainder of the world. The thermometer showed 30 degrees of frost, and snow was piled four feet deep in the roadway and eight feet deep in drifts. No trains could arrive, the rivers were frozen, and even steamers could not venture into harbour. Coals could not be delivered, food rose to famine prices, milk for the children was unattainable, and even the dead could not be transported to the cemeteries. Frozen bodies lay at the Morgue in scores. The very poor, who are terribly numerous in New York, suffered cruelly, many actu- ally dying of hunger and cold, though the response to the demand for aid was most liberal ; while the rich, with their water-pipes and gas-pipes frozen and their hot-air pipes paralysed, took refuge in the hotels. Three days more of this weather would have produced an unexampled calamity, a great capital perishing of frost ; but fortunately on Tuesday the storm, which had previously ravaged the continent from Florida northwards, passed into Canada, even the servants of the municipality resumed work, and next week all Americans will pronounce their climate lovely and taunt the British with having only "samples of weather." If a blizzard is " weather," we prefer samples to supplies.
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