ent fast asleep as usual.

But he woke in the dim blue night. The moon had vanished. He thought he
heard a knocking at his door. "Somebody wants me," he said to himself,
and jumping out of bed, ran to open it.

But there was no one there. He closed it again, and, the noise still
continuing, found that another door in the room was rattling. It
belonged to a closet, he thought, but he had never been able to open it.
The wind blowing in at the window must be shaking it. He would go and
see if it was so.

The door now opened quite easily, but to his surprise, instead of a
closet he found a long narrow room. The moon, which was sinking in the
west, shone in at an open window at the further end. The room was
low with a coved ceiling, and occupied the whole top of the house,
immediately under the roof. It was quite empty. The yellow light of
the half-moon streamed over the dark floor. He was so delighted at the
discovery of the strange, desolate, moonlit place close to his own snug
little room, that he began to dance and skip about the floor. The wind
came in through the door he had left open, and blew about him as he
danced, and he kept turning towards it that it might blow in his face.
He kept picturing to himself the many places, lovely and desolate, the
hill-sides and farm-yards and tree-tops and meadows, over which it had
blown on its way to The Mound. And as he danced, he grew more and more
delighted with the motion and the wind; his feet grew stronger, and his
body lighter, until at length it seemed as if he were borne up on the
air, and could almost fly. So strong did his feeling become, that at
last he began to doubt whether he was not in one of those precious
dreams he had so often had, in which he floated about on the air at
will. But something made him look up, and to his unspeakable delight, he
found his uplifted hands lying in those of North Wind, who was dancing
with him, round and round the long bare room, her hair now falling to
the floor, now filling the arched ceiling, her eyes shining on him like
thinking stars, and the sweetest of grand smiles playing breezily about
her beautiful mouth. She was, as so often before, of the height of a
rather tall lady. She did not stoop in order to dance with him, but held
his hands high in hers. When he saw her, he gave one spring, and his
arms were about her neck, and her arms holding him to her bosom. The
same moment she swept with him through the open window in at whi