mer mornings; and I
never saw such as these, till now.

"And the scientific men are busy as ants, examining the sun, and
the moon, and the seven stars, and can tell me all about _them_, I
believe, by this time; and how they move, and what they are made
of.

"And I do not care, for my part, two copper spangles how they move,
nor what they are made of. I can't move them any other way than
they go, nor make them of anything else, better than they are made.
But I would care much and give much, if I could be told where this
bitter wind comes from, and what _it_ is made of.

"For, perhaps, with forethought, and fine laboratory science, one
might make it of something else.

"It looks partly as if it were made of poisonous smoke; very
possibly it may be: there are at least two hundred furnace chimneys
in a square of two miles on every side of me. But mere smoke would
not blow to and fro in that wild way. It looks more to me as if it
were made of dead men's souls--such of them as are not gone yet
where they have to go, and may be flitting hither and thither,
doubting, themselves, of the fittest place for them.

"You know, if there _are_ such things as souls, and if ever any of
them haunt places where they have been hurt, there must be many
about us, just now, displeased enough!"

The last sentence refers of course to the battles of the
Franco-German campaign, which was especially horrible to me, in its
digging, as the Germans should have known, a moat flooded with
waters of death between the two nations for a century to come.

Since that Midsummer day, my attention, however otherwise occupied,
has never relaxed in its record of the phenomena characteristic of
the plague-wind; and I now define for you, as briefly as possible,
the essential signs of it.

1. It is a wind of darkness,--all the former conditions of
tormenting winds, whether from the north or east were more or less
capable of co-existing with sunlight, and often with steady and
bright sunlight; but whenever, and wherever the plague-wind blows,
be it but for ten minutes, the sky is darkened instantly.

2. It is a malignant _quality_ of wind, unconnected with any one
quarter of the compass; it blows indifferently from all, attaching
its own bitterness and malice to the worst characters of the proper
winds of each quarter. It will blow either with drenching rain, or
dry rage, from the south,--with ruinous blasts from the west,--with
bitterest chills from the