Manalive

A wind sprang high in the west, like a wave of unreasonable happiness, and tore eastward acrossEngland, trailing with it the frosty scent of forests and the cold intoxication of the sea. In a millionholes and corners it refreshed a man like a flagon, and astonished him like a blow. In the inmostchambers of intricate and embowered houses it woke like a domestic explosion, littering the floorwith some professor's papers till they seemed as precious as fugitive, or blowing out the candle bywhich a boy read "Treasure Island" and wrapping him in roaring dark. But everywhere it bore dramainto undramatic lives, and carried the trump of crisis across the world. Many a harassed mother in amean backyard had looked at five dwarfish shirts on the clothes-line as at some small, sick tragedy; itwas as if she had hanged her five children. The wind came, and they were full and kicking as if fivefat imps had sprung into them; and far down in her oppressed subconscious she half-rememberedthose coarse comedies of her fathers when the elves still dwelt in the homes of men. Many anunnoticed girl in a dank walled garden had tossed herself into the hammock with the same intolerantgesture with which she might have tossed herself into the Thames; and that wind rent the wavingwall of woods and lifted the hammock like a balloon, and showed her shapes of quaint clouds farbeyond, and pictures of bright villages far below, as if she rode heaven in a fairy boat. Many a dustyclerk or cleric, plodding a telescopic road of poplars, thought for the hundredth time that they werelike the plumes of a hearse; when this invisible energy caught and swung and clashed them round hishead like a wreath or salutation of seraphic wings. There was in it something more inspired andauthoritative even than the old wind of the proverb; for this was the good wind that blows nobodyharm.