At the Back of the North Wind | Page 5

for my hand
will never change in yours if you keep a good hold. If you keep a hold,
you will know who I am all the time, even when you look at me and
can't see me the least like the North Wind. I may look something very
awful. Do you understand?"
"Quite well," said little Diamond.
"Come along, then," said North Wind, and disappeared behind the
mountain of hay.
Diamond crept out of bed and followed her.
CHAPTER II
THE LAWN
WHEN Diamond got round the corner of the hay, for a moment he
hesitated. The stair by which he would naturally have gone down to the
door was at the other side of the loft, and looked very black indeed; for
it was full of North Wind's hair, as she descended before him. And just
beside him was the ladder going straight down into the stable, up which
his father always came to fetch the hay for Diamond's dinner. Through
the opening in the floor the faint gleam of the-stable lantern was
enticing, and Diamond thought he would run down that way.
The stair went close past the loose-box in which Diamond the horse
lived. When Diamond the boy was half-way down, he remembered that
it was of no use to go this way, for the stable-door was locked. But at
the same moment there was horse Diamond's great head poked out of
his box on to the ladder, for he knew boy Diamond although he was in
his night-gown, and wanted him to pull his ears for him. This Diamond
did very gently for a minute or so, and patted and stroked his neck too,

and kissed the big horse, and had begun to take the bits of straw and
hay out of his mane, when all at once he recollected that the Lady
North Wind was waiting for him in the yard.
"Good night, Diamond," he said, and darted up the ladder, across the
loft, and down the stair to the door. But when he got out into the yard,
there was no lady.
Now it is always a dreadful thing to think there is somebody and find
nobody. Children in particular have not made up their minds to it; they
generally cry at nobody, especially when they wake up at night. But it
was an especial disappointment to Diamond, for his little heart had
been beating with joy: the face of the North Wind was so grand! To
have a lady like that for a friend--with such long hair, too! Why, it was
longer than twenty Diamonds' tails! She was gone. And there he stood,
with his bare feet on the stones of the paved yard.
It was a clear night overhead, and the stars were shining. Orion in
particular was making the most of his bright belt and golden sword. But
the moon was only a poor thin crescent. There was just one great,
jagged, black and gray cloud in the sky, with a steep side to it like a
precipice; and the moon was against this side, and looked as if she had
tumbled off the top of the cloud-hill, and broken herself in rolling down
the precipice. She did not seem comfortable, for she was looking down
into the deep pit waiting for her. At least that was what Diamond
thought as he stood for a moment staring at her. But he was quite
wrong, for the moon was not afraid, and there was no pit she was going
down into, for there were no sides to it, and a pit without sides to it is
not a pit at all. Diamond, however, had not been out so late before in all
his life, and things looked so strange about him!-- just as if he had got
into Fairyland, of which he knew quite as much as anybody; for his
mother had no money to buy books to set him wrong on the subject. I
have seen this world--only sometimes, just now and then, you
know--look as strange as ever I saw Fairyland. But I confess that I have
not yet seen Fairyland at its best. I am always going to see it so some
time. But if you had been out in the face and not at the back of the
North Wind, on a cold rather frosty night, and in your night-gown, you

would have felt it all quite as strange as Diamond did. He cried a little,
just a little, he was so disappointed to lose the lady: of course, you,
little man, wouldn't have done that! But for my part, I don't mind
people crying so much as I mind what they cry about, and how they
cry-- whether they cry quietly like ladies and gentlemen, or go
shrieking