oy
so fiercely disposed against the weather? His cage is snug as long as
the skylight holds. And why should the warm dry noses of the city,
pressed against ten thousand windows up and down the streets, be flat
and sour this morning with disapproval?

It may savor of bravado to find pleasure in what is so commonly
condemned. Here is a smart fellow, you may say, who sets up a
paradox--a conceited braggart who professes a difference to mankind.
Or worse, it may appear that I try my hand at writing in a "happy
vein." God forbid that I should be such a villain! For I once knew a
man who, by reading these happy books, fell into pessimism and a sharp
decline. He had wasted to a peevish shadow and had taken to his bed
before his physician discovered the seat of his anaemia. It was only by
cutting the evil dose, chapter by chapter, that he finally restored
him to his friends. Yet neither supposition of my case is true. We who
enjoy wet and windy days are of a considerable number, and if our
voices are seldom heard in public dispute, it is because we are
overcome by the growling majority. You may know us, however, by our
stout boots, the kind of battered hats we wear, and our disregard of
puddles. To our eyes alone, the rain swirls along the pavements like
the mad rush of sixteenth notes upon a music staff. And to our ears
alone, the wind sings the rattling tune recorded.

Certainly there is more comedy on the streets on a wet and windy day
than there is under a fair sky. Thin folk hold on at corners. Fat folk
waddle before the wind, their racing elbows wing and wing. Hats are
whisked off and sail down the gutters on excited purposes of their
own. It was only this morning that I saw an artistocratic silk hat
bobbing along the pavement in familiar company with a stranger
bonnet--surely a misalliance, for the bonnet was a shabby one. But in
the wind, despite the difference of social station, an instant
affinity had been established and an elopement was under way.

Persons with umbrellas clamp them down close upon their heads and
proceed blindly like the larger and more reckless crabs that you see
in aquariums. Nor can we know until now what spirit for adventure
resides in an umbrella. Hitherto it has stood in a Chinese vase
beneath the stairs and has seemed a listless creature. But when a
November wind is up it is a cousin of the balloon, with an equal zest
to explore the wider precincts of the earth and to alight upon the
moon