On one day he had gone to the end of the long path of temptation: there was relief in that even. And on the next what is finest in human nature had come to his rescue. And both of these things changed him. Every day since had been changing him. The unlifted shadow that had overlain the landscape of his life had begun to break up into moving shadows traversed by rifts of light: a ravishing greenness began to reappear in the world. That old irremovable obstruction across his road had been withdrawn: once again there was a clear path and single vision. But the sower may become a new character; the growth of what he has sowed must go on. And the doctor with a vision clarified and corrected now saw thriving everywhere around him young plants the germs of which he had so long been scattering. A farmer might from a field by dint of infinite patience and searching recover every seed that he had thrown forth; but as well might he try to gather back a shower of raindrops from dry clods. And as the doctor sat in his library that morning with this final announcement to him of how things sown were growing in the nature of his little boy, it seemed to him the moment to call upon Nature for a settlement--Nature who never fails to collect a bill, but who never pays one. And sitting there with the whole subject before him as a physician studying his own case, he asked of Nature whether without any will of his own she had not started him in life with too great susceptibility to the power of suggestion. Far back when his character was being moulded, had not Nature seen to it that wrong suggestions were sown in him? Had not all his trouble started there? Was not _he_ harvesting what he had not scattered? This immeasurable power of suggestion, this new mystery which innumerable minds were now trying to fathom, to govern, to apply. This fresh field of research for his own science of medicine--this wounding and this healing, this waylaying and misleading, by suggestion. This plan of Nature that no human being should escape it, that it should be the very ether which all must breathe. * * * * * Meantime out of doors the face of Nature had rapidly changed; his forecast of early morning had been fulfilled: the wind had died down, clouds had overspread the sky, and it was snowing rapidly. On turnpike and lane and crossroads there was falling the dry snow of true winter when there is sleighing.