the hills and coloured the beautiful roses in my
mother's garden. As I lay drowsily gazing through the window, I
thought I had never known a morning so sultry, and yet so pleasant.
Outside not a leaf stirred; yet the air was fresh, and the madrigal
notes of the birds came to me with a peculiar intensity and clearness.
I listened intently to the curious sound of trilling, which drew
nearer and nearer, until it seemed to merge into a whirring noise that
filled the room and crowded at my ears. At first I could see nothing,
and lay in deadly fear of the unknown; but soon I thought I saw rims
and sparks of spectral fire floating through the pane. Then I heard
some one say, "I am the Wind." But the voice was so like that of an
old friend whom one sees again after many years that my terror
departed, and I asked simply why the Wind had come.

"I have come to you," he replied, "because you are the first man I
have discovered who is after my own heart. You whom others call dreamy
and capricious, volatile and headstrong, you whom some accuse of
weakness, others of unscrupulous abuse of power, you I know to be a
true son of AEolus, a fit inhabitant for those caves of boisterous
song."

"Are you the North Wind or the East Wind?" said I. "Or do you blow
from the Atlantic? Yet if those be your feathers that shine upon the
pane like yellow and purple threads, and if it be through your
influence that the garden is so hot to-day, I should say you were the
lazy South Wind, blowing from the countries that I love."

"I blow from no quarter of the Earth," replied the voice. "I am not in
the compass. I am a little unknown Wind, and I cross not Space but
Time. If you will come with me I will take you not over countries but
over centuries, not directly, but waywardly, and you may travel where
you will. You shall see Napoleon, Caesar, Pericles, if you command. You
may be anywhere in the world at any period. I will show you some of my
friends, the poets...."

"And may I drink red wine with Praxiteles, or with Catullus beside his
lake?"

"Certainly, if you know enough Latin and Greek, and can pronounce them
intelligently."

"And may I live with Thais or Rhodope, or some wild Assyrian queen?"

"Unless they are otherwise employed, certainly."

"Ah, Wind of Time," I continued with a sigh, "we men of this age are
rotten with booklore, and with a yearning for the past. And wherever I
asked to go among those ancient days, I should soon get dis