hot youth. They heeded not the tree as they snapped it, nor the
ship as they whelmed it in the waves; nor the cry of the sinking sailor,
nor the need of his little ones on shore; hasty and selfish even as
children, and, like children, tamed by their own rage. For they tired
themselves by struggling with each other, and by tearing the heavy water
into waves; and their wings grew clogged with sea-spray, and soaked more
and more with steam. But at last the sea grew cold beneath them, and
their clear steam shrank to mist; and they saw themselves and each other
wrapped in dull rain-laden clouds. They then drew their white
cloud-garments round them, and veiled themselves for very shame; and
said, "We have been wild and wayward: and, alas! our pure bright youth is
gone. But we will do one good deed yet ere we die, and so we shall not
have lived in vain. We will glide onward to the land, and weep there;
and refresh all things with soft warm rain; and make the grass grow, the
buds burst; quench the thirst of man and beast, and wash the soiled world
clean."

So they are wandering past us, the air-mothers, to weep the leaves into
their graves; to weep the seeds into their seed-beds, and weep the soil
into the plains; to get the rich earth ready for the winter, and then
creep northward to the ice-world, and there die.

Weary, and still more weary, slowly, and more slowly still, they will
journey on far northward, across fast-chilling seas. For a doom is laid
upon them, never to be still again, till they rest at the North Pole
itself, the still axle of the spinning world; and sink in death around
it, and become white snow-clad ghosts.

But will they live again, those chilled air-mothers? Yes, they must live
again. For all things move for ever; and not even ghosts can rest. So
the corpses of their sisters, piling on them from above, press them
outward, press them southward toward the sun once more; across the floes
and round the icebergs, weeping tears of snow and sleet, while men hate
their wild harsh voices, and shrink before their bitter breath. They
know not that the cold bleak snow-storms, as they hurtle from the black
north-east, bear back the ghosts of the soft air-mothers, as penitents,
to their father, the great sun.

But as they fly southwards, warm life thrills them, and they drop their
loads of sleet and snow; and meet their young live sisters from the
south, and greet them with flash and thunder-peal. And,