NONSUCH 



rain. In some of us, as in Aldous Huxley and my- 

 self, there lingers an inherited vestige of some an- 

 cestral rain-maker or medicine-man. Huxley's an- 

 cestor was a quack, a charlatan of sorts, since his 

 descendant writes, " Bugs — no; I am innocent of 

 bugs. But when it comes to bad weather I have to 

 plead guilty. Bain, frost, wind, snow, hail, fog — 

 I bring them to places where they have never been 

 heard of, at seasons when it is impossible they should 

 occur." 



My ancestor Shaman, on the other hand, was top- 

 hole, infallible, for storms clear as I look up ; when 

 I wish to go out, dense clouds vanish, when I desire 

 to work indoors the weather gets in all its so- 

 called disagreeableness. In twenty places " Beebe 

 Weather" is a by- word; once I was almost sub- 

 sidized to remain in London, so perfectly did I have 

 the weather under control! But I never think of 

 this in advance ; I am conscious of my meteorologi- 

 cal mastery only afterwards, and am humbly thank- 

 ful that in thirty years I have never had a micro- 

 scope or a valuable book even dampened in the 

 rainy season in the tropics. 



I think one insuj^erable difficulty in thinking 

 clearly about the weather is its eternal change. It is 

 like watching the hands of a clock and trying to 

 write something exciting about them. For a year 

 and a half when I was a boy, I used to climb out 

 of a dormer window every late afternoon on to a 

 zinc gutter and in a most uncomfortable position 

 write a description of the sunset. The only thing I 



156 



