hey did not know
that their leafy parents had been lashed last year, even as they were
now; and, though they loved the wind, upon which they dreamt of floating
and waving and being merry and happy, they never expected to be lashed
with whips even before they had unfurled all the young bravery of their
green.

The wind was pitiless. The wind lashed through the air like one
possessed, like a madman that had no feeling: strong in his might and
blind in his heartlessness. And the girl's pity went out to the eager
leaves, the young, hoping leaves, which she saw shaken and pulled and
scourged and driven withered across the street. The blind, all-powerful
north-east wind filled the street: the weathercocks spun madly; the iron
pins of the flagstaff creaked goutily and painfully; the flagstaffs
themselves bent as though they were the masts of a fleet of houses
moored in a roadstead of bricks.

The girl looked out into the street. It was a May morning. Standing in
front of one house and looking for all the world like sailors on a ship
were men dressed in white sailors'-jackets, busy fixing ladders and
climbing up them to clean the plate-glass windows. They swarmed up the
ladders, carrying pails of water; and, in the midst of the forest of
masts, of the red-white-and-blue flagstaffs, they looked like seamen
gaily rigging a ship.

Along the street went the brightly-painted carts of a laundry, a
pastrycook, a butter-factory. Hard behind came loud-voiced hawkers
pushing barrows with oranges and the very first purple-stained
strawberries. And the whole economy of eating and drinking of those tidy
houses, whose life lay hidden behind their lace curtains, filled the
morning street. Butcher-boys prevailed. Each house had a different
butcher. Broad and sturdy, the boys walked along in their clean, white
smocks, carrying their wicker baskets of quivering meat held, with a
fist at the handle, firmly on shoulder or hip, bending their bodies a
little because of the weight; and they rang at all the doors. Sometimes,
a couple bicycled swiftly down the street. At all the houses they
delivered loads of meat: beefsteaks and rumpsteaks and fillet-steaks and
ribs and sirloins of beef and balls of forced-meat; the maid-servants
took the meat in at the front-doors, with an exchange of chaff, and then
closed the door again with a bang. The butcher-boys largely prevailed;
but the greengrocers, with their barrows arranged with fresh vegetables,
were