IRISH MEMORIES—WEST AND EAST 
IL.—A WESTERN GARDEN 
O man need hope to escape his fate, and for the dweller in The West 
the West of Ireland that fate is apt to present itself as a 
very watery one. Rain is an element in which, for a large 
portion of his time, he is apt to be more or less continuously 
immersed. It is about his path, and if not—let us hope— 
directly about his bed, at least at no period very far away 
from it. To what extent meteorological conditions such as 
these affect the more personal and psychological ones is a 
big question, far too big for me to enlarge upon in so 
short an article as this. That to a greater or less extent 
it does affect them, there can, I think, be no reasonable 
question. Indeed, when one observes the marked, frequently 
objurgatory, effect produced where a comparatively momentary 
immersion is in question, who can doubt that where generation 
after generation has lived, met, married, died, and been buried 
under such skies, the external conditions must in fairness be 
held to account for a good many things that to some austere 
observers appear to require accounting for. That “the soul 
makes its own climate” is a comfortable no less than a lofty 
doctrine. At the same time it is well to recollect that climate 
is at least equally capable of returning the compliment! 
It has always appeared to me to be one of the odder char- 
acteristics of that very watery divinity who presides over the region 
that when, once in a cycle or so, he relents, and shows symptoms 
of reformation, the results are a good deal less satisfactory 
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