of mere nothings. You, for whom above all I am setting
these things down, will find them among my papers one day. They would
seem meaningless to most of my fellow men, I believe; to me they are
absorbingly interesting reading when once in a great while I pick an
older record up and glance it over. But this is digressing.

Now slowly, slowly another fact came home to me. This unanimous,
synchronous march of all the flakes coming down over hundreds of square
miles--and I was watching it myself over miles upon miles of road--in
spite of the fact that every single flake seemed to be in the greatest
possible hurry--was, judged as a whole, nevertheless an exceedingly
leisurely process. In one respect it reminded me of bees swarming;
watch the single bee, and it seems to fly at its utmost speed; watch the
swarm, and it seems to be merely floating along. The reason, of course,
is entirely different. The bees wheel and circle around individually,
the whole swarm revolves--if I remember right, Burroughs has well
described it (as what has he not?). [Footnote: Yes; I looked it up. See
the "Pastoral Bees" in "Locusts and Wild Honey."] But the snow will not
change its direction while drifting in a wind that blows straight ahead.
Its direction is from first to last the resultant of the direction
of the wind and that of the pull of gravity, into which there enters
besides only the ratio of the strengths of these two forces. The single
snowflake is to the indifferent eye something infinitesimal, too small
to take individual notice of, once it reaches the ground. For most of us
it hardly has any separate existence, however it may be to more astute
observers. We see the flakes in the mass, and we judge by results. Now
firstly, to talk of results, the filling up of a hollow, unless the
drifting snow is simply picked up from the ground where it lay ready
from previous falls, proceeds itself rather slowly and in quite a
leisurely way. But secondly, and this is the more important reason, the
wind blows in waves of greater and lesser density; these waves--and I
do not know whether this observation has ever been recorded though
doubtless it has been made by better observers than I am--these waves,
I say, are propagated in a direction opposite to that of the wind. They
are like sound-waves sent into the teeth of the wind, only they travel
more slowly. Anybody who has observed a really splashing rain on smooth
ground--on a cement sidewalk, for ins