i88 OLD PLYMOUTH TRAILS 



Always during August Jupiter Pluvius is wont 

 to change all this. He sends us not showers, 

 but a rain that wets us for a day and a night and 

 perhaps longer, and, however greedily the 

 parched earth may suck it up, finally irrigates all 

 the waste places and covers all the sore earth 

 with 'a soothing, healing salve of mud. Such 

 rains come in to us riding on the broad back of 

 the east wind, as rode the prince in Andersen's 

 fairy tale, and as the big drops fall upon us we 

 catch intoxicating scents borne to us from far 

 Cathay. On the east wind's back the prince rode 

 into paradise itself, which still lies hidden be- 

 neath hills to the eastward of the Himalayas. 

 We should not blame him for kissing the fairy 

 princess and being banished, for if he had not 

 done so he had not brought back the tale and 

 we should not know whence came the soothing 

 odors that drip with the rain from the wings of 

 the east wind. Fragrance of spice and of flow- 

 ers, bloom of ripe fruit, of grape and fig and 

 pomegranate and quaint odor of olive, scents that 

 have ripened long in the purple dusk of paradise, 

 the east wind caught in his garments and bore 

 back to the cold forests of Northern Germany 

 that night that the prince rode with him. Nor 



