Manalive

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 the cold intoxicationof the sea. In a million holes and corners it refreshed a man like a flagon, and astonishedhim like a blow. In the inmost chambers of intricate and embowered houses it woke like adomestic explosion, littering the floor with some professor's papers till they seemed asprecious as fugitive, or blowing out the candle by which a boy read "Treasure Island" andwrapping him in roaring dark. But everywhere it bore drama into undramatic lives, andcarried the trump of crisis across the world. Many a harassed mother in a mean backyardhad looked at five dwarfish shirts on the clothes-line as at some small, sick tragedy; it wasas if she had hanged her five children. The wind came, and they were full and kicking as iffive fat imps had sprung into them; and far down in her oppressed subconscious she halfremembered those coarse comedies of her fathers when the elves still dwelt in the homesof men. Many an unnoticed girl in a dank walled garden had tossed herself into thehammock with the same intolerant gesture with which she might have tossed herself intothe Thames; and that wind rent the waving wall of woods and lifted the hammock like aballoon, and showed her shapes of quaint clouds far beyond, and pictures of bright villagesfar below, as if she rode heaven in a fairy boat. Many a dusty clerk or cleric, plodding atelescopic road of poplars, thought for the hundredth time that they were like the plumes ofa hearse; when this invisible energy caught and swung and clashed them round his headlike 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 blowsnobody harm.The flying blast struck London just where it scales the northern heights, terrace aboveterrace, as precipitous as Edinburgh. It was round about this place that some poet, probably drunk, looked up astonished at all those streets gone skywards, and (thinkingvaguely of glaciers and roped mountaineers) gave it the name of Swiss Cottage, which it hasnever been able to shake off. At some stage of those heights a terrace of tall gray houses, mostly empty and almost as desolate as the Grampians, curved round at the western end, so that the last building, a boarding establishment called "Beacon House," offered abruptlyto the sunset its high, narrow and towering termination, like the prow of some desertedsh