plants flowerless, as he did the ferns, or he could have dyed all flow- 

 ers with one pigment, or he might have left odors out in compounding 

 his flowers and leaves and grasses and earths; but thanks to his good 

 Providence, he forgot not the sandalwood's clinging fragrance, nor the 

 scents of roses and wheat stubble nor new-mown hay nor green wal- 

 nuts, nor forgot to make dews at night, to distill odors from woodlands 

 and plains, nor neglected that sweet inrush of earth and air smells 

 which puffs in the face some unexpected morning and sings to the 

 soul Springtime! God ransacked his treasuries when he made this 

 world; nor was it in spirit of haste or obliviousness, when, on the day 

 he finished the building of his world he said, "I have found all things 

 good." If the wind fans a hot cheek to blow its fever out, or fills the 

 flapping sails of innumerable ships, I count that to be a lesser blessing 

 than its gift of touch and music. The wind's touch can be as tender 

 as a loving woman's caress and its music as gentle and sweet as mem- 

 ories fetched from a happy past. To miss the blowing of the trumpets 

 of the winds is to suffer loss. The wind's voices are inexpressible 

 music. I love their laughter and their weeping, their wailing of autumn 

 and their leaf-patter, like the sound of spring showers. I was reared in 

 Kansas, where winds have what some esteem a vicious supremacy, but 

 to me their trumpetings and stormy chargings to and fro, their shrill 

 falsettos through leafless trees; their summer sweep, which wrecks 

 the fleets of clouds as if they, were ships blown on ragged ocean rocks; 

 their whine at the casement, like a patient dog pleading for its master, 

 and their wholly tender touch of a June evening wind I love them all. 

 Not one will I willingly leave out of my memory or deny room at the 

 fireside of my life. They are part of me. It may be because my 

 father's folk for unknown generations were sea captains and lovers of 

 the raging waters, tempest-swirled and were all drowned at sea, that 

 tempests are mixed with my blood and are part of my soul's dear 

 possessions. But certain I am that winds do not vex me and that I 

 am lonely apart from them as missing one of my home folks. Their 

 ardor warms my spirit and their gentle quiet is like a call to prayer. 

 Jesus loved the winds, and, as I think, tore a scrap 

 from the book of his boyhood when he said (he 

 was thinking of Nazareth when he spoke), "The 

 wind bloweth where it listeth" those un- 

 certain, unmannerly, brusque winds, which 



^ betimes whipped up Esdraelon's loitering 



98 





