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, please God, before many weeks are over, as we run Westward Ho, we shall overtake the ghosts of these air-mothers, hurrying back toward their father, the great sun.  Fresh and bright under the fresh bright heaven, they will race with us toward our home, to gain new heat, new life, new power, and set forth about their work once more.  Men call them the south-west wind, those air-mothers; and their ghosts the north-east trade; and value them, and rightly, because they bear the traders out and home across the sea.  But wise men, and little children, should look on them with more seeing eyes; and say, “May not these winds be living creatures?  They, too, are thoughts of God, to whom all live.”

For is not our life like their life?  Do we not come and go as they?  Out of God’s boundless bosom, the fount of life, we came; through selfish, stormy youth, and contrite tears—­just not too late; through manhood not altogether useless; through slow and chill old age, we return from Whence we came; to the Bosom of God once more—­to go forth again, it may be, with fresh knowledge, and fresh powers, to nobler work.  Amen.

* * * * *

Such was the prophecy which I learnt, or seemed to learn, from the south-western wind off the Atlantic, on a certain delectable evening.  And it was fulfilled at night, as far as the gentle air-mothers could fulfil it, for foolish man.

   “There was a roaring in the woods all night;
   The rain came heavily and fell in floods;
   But now the sun is rising calm and bright,
   The birds are singing in the distant woods;
   Over his own sweet voice the stock-dove broods,
   The jay makes answer as the magpie chatters,
   And all the air is filled with pleasant noise of waters”

But was I a gloomy and distempered man, if, upon such a morn as that, I stood on the little bridge across a certain brook, and watched the water run, with something of a sigh?  Or if, when the schoolboy beside me lamented that the floods would surely be out, and his day’s fishing spoiled, I said to him—­“Ah, my boy, that is a little matter.  Look at what you are seeing now, and understand what barbarism and waste mean.  Look at all that beautiful water which God has sent us hither off the Atlantic, without trouble or expense to us.  Thousands, and tens of thousands, of gallons will run under this bridge to-day; and what shall we do with it?  Nothing.  And yet:  think only of the mills which that water would have turned.  Think how it might have kept up health and cleanliness in poor creatures packed away in the back streets of the nearest town, or even in London itself.  Think even how country folk, in many parts of England, in three months’ time, may be crying out for rain, and afraid of short crops, and fever, and scarlatina, and cattle-plague, for want of the very water which we are now letting run back, wasted, into the sea from whence it came.  And yet we call ourselves a civilised people.”