INDIAN SUMMER AND THE COMET

T

HE Farmer's Calendar for May, 1818, affords an exhilarating item:

Planting time is close by and we begin to think of Indian dumplings and puddings. Be not discouraged about raising corn. Uncle Jethro says that the good old Indian summers will return again. He is a great philosopher and astronomer, and ascribes our frosty seasons, which have been so troublesome of late, to the spots in the sun, which however he says, will soon be entirely obliterated. The tail of the comet is shortly to pass over the sun's disk, like a dusting brush, and they will be seen no more.

Indian summer is as familiar a phrase as can well be imagined, and the thing itself is confidently expected by all of us when late autumn comes round. The history of the term, however, is obscure enough; but much light is thrown upon it by Mr. Albert Matthews in a learned paper published by the United States Weather Bureau.1

The earliest example of the term which Mr. Matthews has discovered occurs in Major Ebenezer Denny's Journal under the date of October 13, 1794: "Pleasant weather. The Indian summer here. Frosty nights." The diarist must surely have used a phrase that was perfectly familiar to him, and of course he adds no explanation, his entry being intended for his own eye alone. Four years later, in June, 1798, Dr. Mason F. Cogswell, describing the pre

1 The Term Indian Summer, Monthly Weather Review for January and February, 1902.

2 Military Journal, Memoirs Hist. Soc. of Penn., VII, 402.

ceding winter at Hartford, Connecticut, remarks: "About the beginning of January the weather softened considerably, and continued mild for several days. Most people supposed the Indian summer was approaching (a week or fortnight of warm weather, which generally takes place about the middle of January), but, instead of this, there succeeded to these pleasant days a delightful fall of snow, about a foot in depth, which was bound down by an incrustation of hail, and prevented from blowing in heaps by the winds which followed." In 1803 the French traveller Volney, who visited America between 1795 and 1798, mentioned the Indian summer as occurring towards November and equated it with the "St. Martin's summer" of the French.2

These are the only writers of the eighteenth century, so far as we know, who employ the term Indian summer at all. They are, however, quite independent of each other, and their testimony establishes one fact beyond peradventure: the phrase was common among the people in the last decade of that century. The presumption is that it had been in use a good while, and we are not surprised therefore to learn that in 1809 Dr. Shadrach Ricketson, of New York, wrote of the name as "long known in this country." Five more examples have been discovered by Mr. Matthews before 1820, to which that from the Almanac for 1818 may now be added as a sixth. From this time the term becomes frequent. Its picturesqueness and agreeable associations commended it to writers of every grade and it was soon established in literature on both sides of the Atlantic. It lent itself readily to figurative applications. As early as 1830 De Quincey wrote of the great Bentley: "An Indian summer crept stealthily over his closing days; a summer

1 Medical Repository, II, 282.

2 Tableau du Climat et du Sol des États-Unis d'Amérique, Paris, 1803, I, 283.

3 Medical Repository, Second Hexade, VI, 187.

less gaudy than the mighty summer of the solstice, but sweet, golden, silent; happy, though sad; and to Bentley

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it was never known that this sweet mimicry of summera spiritual or fairy echo of a mighty music that has departed is as frail and transitory as it is solemn, quiet, and lovely." So thoroughly has the term become a part of the English language, that the Poet Laureate, in addressing Queen Victoria on her birthday in 1899, could find no more appropriate designation for her gracious old age than “the Indian Summer of your days." Few Americanisms have had so triumphant a progress.

The origin of the term Indian summer is a mystery. There is no evidence that it was employed in the early days of American colonization or that it was derived by the white man from the aborigines. Nobody has left it on record, as we have seen, before 1794. Nor are there any comments on the phenomenon itself in older writers on America. Yet there were several English names for this charming and elusive season, and some or all of them our forefathers must have brought to this country with them. "All-hallown summer," i. e. the summer of All Hallows or All Saints, is one. It is jestingly applied to Falstaff by Prince Hal in the First Part of King Henry IV: -"Farewell, thou latter spring! farewell, All-hallown summer!" (act i, scene 2.) Both epithets characterize Falstaff as an old youth. Another English name, adapted from the French, is "St. Martin's summer," which occurs in the First Part of Henry VI (act i, scene 2):

This night the siege assuredly I'll raise:

Expect Saint Martin's summer, halcyon days,
Since I have entered into these wars.

All Hallows is November 1 and St. Martin's day is November 14, so that these designations agree well enough with the current expectation in America, where we look for 1 Works, Edinburgh, 1862-63, VI, 180.