A footnote in my edition of _Middletown_

"The relation of climate to the elaborate equilibrium of activities that make up living is suggested by the late James J. Hill's motto to which he is said absolutely to have adhered: 'You can't interest me in any proposition in any place where it doesn't snow,' or, more picturesquely, 'No man on whom the snow does not fall ever amounts to a tinker's dam.' (Quoted in J Russell Smith's _North America_, New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co, 1925, p. 8)."