38 THOUGHT-PROMOTING WIND 



The effect of the wind on me, always greatest 

 when it caught me on horseback, when, during the 

 first half of my life, I was constantly riding and 

 sometimes passed weeks at a stretch on a horse 

 every day from morning till night, is now my subject. 

 When in my teens I first began to think, I found that 

 my best time was when on horseback, in a high wind. 

 It was not like the purely agreeable sensation of a 

 soft caressing wind, or of riding in a comparatively 

 quiet air in a genial sunshine; it was a pleasure of 

 a distinctly different kind, if it can be called pleasure. 

 Certainly that word does not give the feeling its char- 

 acteristic expression, but I have no other. It was 

 a sense of a change, bodily and mental, a wonderful 

 exhilaration and mental activity. " Now I can 

 think! " I would exclaim mentally, when starting on 

 a gallop over the great plain — that green floor of 

 the world where I was born — in the face of a strong 

 wind. Nor could it be said that this was only the effect 

 of being mounted and of rapid motion. We know that 

 merely to be on the back of a good horse does give 

 us a sense of power and elation; or, as Lord Herbert 

 of Cherbury says in his autobiography, " It lifts a 

 man above himself." Here I may remark in passing 

 that this feeling, as he describes it, is common to those 

 who, however familiar with the horse they may be, 

 are only on his back occasionally, or at all events 

 not nearly so often as they are on their own legs and 

 on chairs and couches. To one reared in a semi- 

 wild riding country the feeling is somewhat different; 

 in the saddle one is there conscious of being simply 



