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THE TWO WINDS.

(A FAIRY STORY FOR THE SEASON OF 1891.  IMITATED—­AT A DISTANCE—­FROM HANS ANDERSEN’S CELEBRATED TALE OF “THE FOUR WINDS.")

[Illustration]

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The Mother of the Winds (acting as locum tenens for her Clerk of the Weather, who, sick of his own unseasonable work, was off to spend his annual holiday with Mr. ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON in the Pacific Isles), received the desperately damp, dishevelled, blown-about, and almost heart-broken Princess AGRICULTURA at the door of the Cave.

“Oh, here you are again!” she cried, “once more in the Cavern of the Winds!  And this time you have brought two of my sons with you, I see,” she added, pointing to the South Wind and the West Wind, who were blowing away at the Princess like bellowsy blends of Blizzards, Cloud-bursts, Tornadoes and Tritons.

“Oh, do for pity’s sake, stop them!” cried AGRICULTURA, struggling hard to keep herself and her garments together.  “It seems as though the heavens have become one vast sluice, that keeps pouring down water, as my predecessor, the Prince, put it.  I have not a dry thread about me. Please put them in their Bags—­do—­whilst I have a little talk with you about them, and the mischief they have been doing.”

Two prolonged chuckles, a deep stentorian one and a sharp staccato one, came from the two Bags already hanging to the wall of the Cavern, from whence subsequently protruded the round ruddy form of the North and the pinched figure of the East Wind.  “Ho! ho! ho!” chortled the North Wind, chokingly.  “Who says I do all the damage?”

“He! he! he!” sniggered the East Wind, raspingly.  “Who is the pickle and spoil-sport now, I should like to know?”

“Shut up!” said the Mother of the Winds, sharply.  “And as to you two,” she added, turning to the South and West Winds, “if you don’t stand still and give an account of yourselves, I’ll pop you into your respective Bags in the twinkling of a hundred-ton gun!”

“Why, who is she, that she should call us over the clouds?” cried the two Winds, stopping their blowing a bit, and pointing to the Princess.

“She is my guest,” said the old woman; “and if that does not satisfy you, you need only get into the Bags.  Do you understand me now?”

Well, this did the business at once; and the two Winds, in a breath, began to relate whence they came, and what they had been doing for nearly three months past.

“We have been spoiling the English Summer,” they said.

“That’s nothing new,” muttered the Mother of the Winds.