please God,
before many weeks are over, as we run Westward Ho, we shall overtake the
ghosts of these air-mothers, hurrying back toward their father, the great
sun. Fresh and bright under the fresh bright heaven, they will race with
us toward our home, to gain new heat, new life, new power, and set forth
about their work once more. Men call them the south-west wind, those air-
mothers; and their ghosts the north-east trade; and value them, and
rightly, because they bear the traders out and home across the sea. But
wise men, and little children, should look on them with more seeing eyes;
and say, "May not these winds be living creatures? They, too, are
thoughts of God, to whom all live."

For is not our life like their life? Do we not come and go as they? Out
of God's boundless bosom, the fount of life, we came; through selfish,
stormy youth, and contrite tears--just not too late; through manhood not
altogether useless; through slow and chill old age, we return from Whence
we came; to the Bosom of God once more--to go forth again, it may be,
with fresh knowledge, and fresh powers, to nobler work. Amen.

* * * * *

Such was the prophecy which I learnt, or seemed to learn, from the south-
western wind off the Atlantic, on a certain delectable evening. And it
was fulfilled at night, as far as the gentle air-mothers could fulfil it,
for foolish man.

"There was a roaring in the woods all night;
The rain came heavily and fell in floods;
But now the sun is rising calm and bright,
The birds are singing in the distant woods;
Over his own sweet voice the stock-dove broods,
The jay makes answer as the magpie chatters,
And all the air is filled with pleasant noise of waters"

But was I a gloomy and distempered man, if, upon such a morn as that, I
stood on the little bridge across a certain brook, and watched the water
run, with something of a sigh? Or if, when the schoolboy beside me
lamented that the floods would surely be out, and his day's fishing
spoiled, I said to him--"Ah, my boy, that is a little matter. Look at
what you are seeing now, and understand what barbarism and waste mean.
Look at all that beautiful water which God has sent us hither off the
Atlantic, without trouble or expense to us. Thousands, and tens of
thousands, of gallons will run under this bridge to-day; and what shall
we do with it? Nothing. And yet: think only of the mills which that
water would have turned. Think