Many a harassed mother in a mean backyard had looked at five
dwarfish shirts on the clothes-line as at some small, sick tragedy;
it was as if she had hanged her five children. The wind came, and they
were full and kicking as if five fat imps had sprung into them; and far
down in her oppressed subconscious she half-remembered those coarse
comedies of her fathers when the elves still dwelt in the homes of men.
Many an unnoticed girl in a dank walled garden had tossed herself
into the hammock with the same intolerant gesture with which she
might have tossed herself into the Thames; and that wind rent
the waving wall of woods and lifted the hammock like a balloon,
and showed her shapes of quaint clouds far beyond, and pictures
of bright villages far below, as if she rode heaven in a fairy boat.
Many a dusty clerk or cleric, plodding a telescopic road of poplars,
thought for the hundredth time that they were like the plumes
of a hearse; when this invisible energy caught and swung and clashed
them round his head like a wreath or salutation of seraphic wings.
There was in it something more inspired and authoritative even
than the old wind of the proverb; for this was the good wind
that blows nobody harm.
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