A wind sprang high in the west, like a wave of unreasonable happiness, and toreeastward across England, trailing with it the frosty scent of forests and thecold intoxication of the sea. In a million holes and corners it refreshed a manlike a flagon, and astonished him like a blow. In the inmost chambers ofintricate and embowered houses it woke like a domestic explosion, littering thefloor with some professor’s papers till they seemed as precious asfugitive, or blowing out the candle by which a boy read “TreasureIsland” and wrapping him in roaring dark. But everywhere it bore dramainto undramatic lives, and carried the trump of crisis across the world. Many aharassed mother in a mean backyard had looked at five dwarfish shirts on theclothes-line as at some small, sick tragedy; it was as if she had hanged herfive children. The wind came, and they were full and kicking as if five fatimps had sprung into them; and far down in her oppressed subconscious shehalf-remembered those coarse comedies of her fathers when the elves still dweltin the homes of men. Many an unnoticed girl in a dank walled garden had tossedherself into the hammock with the same intolerant gesture with which she mighthave tossed herself into the Thames; and that wind rent the waving wall ofwoods and lifted the hammock like a balloon, and showed her shapes of quaintclouds far beyond, and pictures of bright villages far below, as if she rodeheaven in a fairy boat. Many a dusty clerk or cleric, plodding a telescopicroad of poplars, thought for the hundredth time that they were like the plumesof a hearse; when this invisible energy caught and swung and clashed them roundhis head like a wreath or salutation of seraphic wings. There was in itsomething more inspired and authoritative even than the old wind of theproverb; for this was the good wind that blows nobody harm.
The flying blast struck London just where it scales the northern heights,terrace above terrace, as precipitous as Edinburgh. It was roun