atient in their
cones. "Blow stronger, blow fiercer, slow air-mothers, and shake us from
our prisons of dead wood, that we may fly and spin away north-eastward,
each on his horny wing. Help us but to touch the moorland yonder, and we
will take good care of ourselves henceforth; we will dive like arrows
through the heather, and drive our sharp beaks into the soil, and rise
again as green trees toward the sunlight, and spread out lusty boughs."

They never think, bold fools, of what is coming, to bring them low in the
midst of their pride; of the reckless axe which will fell them, and the
saw which will shape them into logs; and the trains which will roar and
rattle over them, as they lie buried in the gravel of the way, till they
are ground and rotted into powder, and dug up and flung upon the fire,
that they too may return home, like all things, and become air and
sunlight once again.

And the air-mothers hear their prayers, and do their bidding: but
faintly; for they themselves are tired and sad.

Tired and sad are the air-mothers, and their garments rent and wan. Look
at them as they stream over the black forest, before the dim
south-western sun; long lines and wreaths of melancholy grey, stained
with dull yellow or dead dun. They have come far across the seas, and
done many a wild deed upon their way; and now that they have reached the
land, like shipwrecked sailors, they will lie down and weep till they can
weep no more.

Ah, how different were those soft air-mothers when, invisible to mortal
eyes, they started on their long sky-journey, five thousand miles across
the sea! Out of the blazing caldron which lies between the two New
Worlds, they leapt up when the great sun called them, in whirls and
spouts of clear hot steam; and rushed of their own passion to the
northward, while the whirling earth-ball whirled them east. So north-
eastward they rushed aloft, across the gay West Indian isles, leaving
below the glitter of the flying-fish, and the sidelong eyes of cruel
sharks; above the cane-fields and the plaintain-gardens, and the cocoa-
groves which fringe the shores; above the rocks which throbbed with
earthquakes, and the peaks of old volcanoes, cinder-strewn; while, far
beneath, the ghosts of their dead sisters hurried home upon the north-
east breeze.

Wild deeds they did as they rushed onward, and struggled and fought among
themselves, up and down, and round and backward, in the fury of their
blind