stalk and twig. They did not know that the wind was always at work, lashing, as with angry scourges, with stinging whips; they did not know that their leafy parents had been lashed last year, even as they were now; and, though they loved the wind, upon which they dreamt of floating and waving and being merry and happy, they never expected to be lashed with whips even before they had unfurled all the young bravery of their green.
The wind was pitiless. The wind lashed through the air like one possessed, like a madman that had no feeling: strong in his might and blind in his heartlessness. And the girl’s pity went out to the eager leaves, the young, hoping leaves, which she saw shaken and pulled and scourged and driven withered across the street. The blind, all-powerful north-east wind filled the street: the weathercocks spun madly; the iron pins of the flagstaff creaked goutily and painfully; the flagstaffs themselves bent as though they were the masts of a fleet of houses moored in a roadstead of bricks.
The girl looked out into the street. It was a May morning. Standing in front of one house and looking for all the world like sailors on a ship were men dressed in white sailors’-jackets, busy fixing ladders and climbing up them to clean the plate-glass windows. They swarmed up the ladders, carrying pails of water; and, in the midst of the forest of masts, of the red-white-and-blue flagstaffs, they looked like seamen gaily rigging a ship.
Along the street went the brightly-painted carts
