INFLUENCE OF THE WIND 37 



cranks, and improvers of their kind generally; but 

 here the individual reformer can find no disciple; 

 he is one against an incalculable multitude all wound 

 up to keep on the old bad way so that his better way 

 inevitably comes to an end with himself. 



Imagination was not the right word, at all events 

 in its restricted sense, while the other phrase of the 

 constant intuition of snow suggests that these world- 

 wide physical effects are due principally to a purely 

 psychical cause. Well, I don't find it impossible to 

 believe that. One always wants to find something 

 to believe, some way out of the maze, for we do know 

 that in the lower animals, as in man, the mind does 

 react on the organism sometimes with tremendous 

 power, to the production of strange results, as we 

 see, for example, in cases of pre-natal suggestion. 



However, just now we are concerned mainly with 

 the atmospheric sense, and particularly with the 

 influence of the wind. 



While classing myself as an ordinary outdoor 

 natural man, tolerant, and more than tolerant, of all 

 weathers and Nature's influence in all her moods 

 and manifestations, I yet fear when coming back to 

 this subject that I shall find no support in anything 

 said by others in what remains to be told. There is, 

 then, nothing but my own personal experience, and as 

 every face of man and every mind differs from every 

 other face and every other mind, so it may be that 

 the wind, when it visits me, tells me a story some- 

 what different from the thousands and millions of 

 stories it has told and tells to others. 



