north,--and with venomous blight from the
east.

Its own favorite quarter, however, is the southwest, so that it is
distinguished in its malignity equally from the Bise of Provence,
which is a north wind always, and from our own old friend, the
east.

3. It always blows _tremulously_, making the leaves of the trees
shudder as if they were all aspens, but with a peculiar fitfulness
which gives them--and I watch them this moment as I write--an
expression of anger as well as of fear and distress. You may see
the kind of quivering, and hear the ominous whimpering, in the
gusts that precede a great thunderstorm; but plague-wind is more
panic-struck, and feverish; and its sound is a hiss instead of a
wail.

When I was last at Avallon, in South France, I went to see 'Faust'
played at the little country theater: it was done with scarcely any
means of pictorial effect, except a few old curtains, and a blue
light or two. But the night on the Brocken was nevertheless
extremely appalling to me,--a strange ghastliness being obtained in
some of the witch scenes merely by fine management of gesture and
drapery; and in the phantom scenes, by the half-palsied,
half-furious, faltering or fluttering past of phantoms stumbling as
into graves; as if of not only soulless, but senseless, Dead,
moving with the very action, the rage, the decrepitude, and the
trembling of the plague-wind.

4. Not only tremulous at every moment, it is also _intermittent_
with a rapidity quite unexampled in former weather. There are,
indeed, days--and weeks, on which it blows without cessation, and
is as inevitable as the Gulf Stream; but also there are days when
it is contending with healthy weather, and on such days it will
remit for half an hour, and the sun will begin to show itself, and
then the wind will come back and cover the whole sky with clouds
in ten minutes; and so on, every half-hour, through the whole day;
so that it is often impossible to go on with any kind of drawing in
color, the light being never for two seconds the same from morning
till evening.

5. It degrades, while it intensifies, ordinary storm; but before I
read you any description of its efforts in this kind, I must
correct an impression which has got abroad through the papers, that
I speak as if the plague-wind blew now always, and there were no
more any natural weather. On the contrary, the winter of 1878-9 was
one of the most healthy and lovely I ever saw ice in;--Coniston