Norwich bulletin., 1913-04-12

CWritten Specially for The Bulletin.)
 Of course you've all been reading about the torandoes and floods out west So've l. And I've been glad about sixty times a minute for the last two weeks that I didn't live in Nebraska, nor in Ohio, nor in Indiana, nor "by the banks of the Wabash" or the Hudson or the SuSQuehanna or any other rampaging river I'm think ing that it's better to be dry-foot Nutmegger than a drowned Buckeye or a tornadoed Omahan. I can't help believing that we Connecticut farm blown-up, left on solid ground and out of the water, than those noor chaps whose bodies are being dug out of the ruins behind the cyclone, or have been buried under the mud of a score of swollen rivers
 This isn't a wholly new feeling with me. but recent events have accentu- ated it. Undoubtedly there are things to be said for those places out west. They must have some advantages, or people wouldn't live in them. But what's the good of a level farm and stoneless fields and easy farming gen orally. after you're drowned by the MusEingum river, or blown into small bits by a 22-miles hour Nebraskan tornado? I'd rather continue alive and kicking, myself. than be uncere- moniously kicked out of life by what is. after all, merely a meteorological disturbance.
 A recent book about the weather by a writer of wide reputation, after des- cribing tornadoes local revolving storms of narrow width, short course, but tremendous velocity goes on to say that New England is free from them. This isn't exactly and teetotally true. I remember reporting one up in Agawam and Longmeadow, Mass, forty years ago, which tore big trees
 S,%O kindling-wood blew down old stone walls, carried at least one COW sixty rods through the air and drove her head and horns into a gravel bank, fifty feet up, so that she hung there for days afterwards. And then there was the Wallingford tornado. later, which. among other things, actually blew the water out of big pond fish, and all.
 Oh. yes, we have lem. occasionally. But they're rare happenings with us. They aren't a regular part of the years | doing's. And, as rule, we've got ] the pesky things very quickly, if they l do start
 On the whole and taking the years | as they run, my dears, it seems to me l that we of New England are
 Mighty
 Lucky
 if the editor of The Bulletin will | allow me that typographically James 1 wh1tcombrileyish form of emphasizing | my feelings. not young and charming" but ] young and ca1low, my older brother , took the western fever and struck out ! for the frontier. He went a couple of l hundred more by boat and stage. The first year, his letters home were glow ing Then they gradually grew less optimistic. Father used to read them Der one phrase in this latter period which impressed me forcibly, because it was about myself, though I didn't fully grasp the import till much later. understand,-"ge any local preju- dices."
 You see he was beginning to fear that I. too, might get the idea that the best place was Somewhere Else. | Now the plain, unrhetorical, common sense truth is that there isn't any best place anywhere on this round earth. There are places which have one set of advantages, and one set of dis advantages. Others have differ ent sets. There isn't one from Maine's top-knot sticking up into the north. to F1orida's tail wiggiing in the warm waters of the tropics, which hasn't
  thing evil. The optimist, in which ever extreme he finds himself will see more good than i'll in his surrounding. ArI the pessimist will sea more i'll than good
 The sensible man will take the bit ter with the sweet, will use to their full opportunities which he has, and will dodge as best he can the affections which chase him.
 Some years ago a friend of mine who had lived through forty or fifty New England springs, declared that he wouldn't stand for another one. He was tired of snow and blow, and mud and slush, and alterna tions of parbOiltng heat with marrow chilling cold. So he strengthened out his busi- ness, bought a ticket for New Orleans, ADOid Inaz