Fifty-One Tales | Page 3

year," said a hen.
And the year wore on and the swallows came again, and the year wore
on and they sat again on the gables, and all the poultry discussed the
departure of the hen.
And very early one morning, the wind being from the North, the
swallows all soared suddenly and felt the wind in their wings; and a
strength came upon them and a strange old knowledge and a more than

human faith, and flying high they left the smoke of our cities and small
remembered eaves, and saw at last the huge and homeless sea, and
steering by grey sea-currents went southward with the wind. And going
South they went by glittering fog-banks and saw old islands lifting their
heads above them; they saw the slow quests of the wandering ships,
and divers seeking pearls, and lands at war, till there came in view the
mountains that they sought and the sight of the peaks they knew; and
they descended into an austral valley, and saw Summer sometimes
sleeping and sometimes singing song.
"I think the wind is about right," said the hen; and she spread her wings
and ran out of the poultry-yard. And she ran fluttering out on to the
road and some way down it until she came to a garden.
At evening she came back panting.
And in the poultry-yard she told the poultry how she had gone South as
far as the high road, and saw the great world's traffic going by, and
came to lands where the potato grew, and saw the stubble upon which
men live, and at the end of the road had found a garden, and there were
roses in it--beautiful roses!--and the gardener himself was there with
his braces on.
"How extremely interesting," the poultry said, "and what a really
beautiful description!"
And the Winter wore away, and the bitter months went by, and the
Spring of the year appeared, and the swallows came again.
"We have been to the South," they said, "and the valleys beyond the
sea."
But the poultry would not agree that there was a sea in the South: "You
should hear our hen," they said.

WIND AND FOG

"Way for us," said the North Wind as he came down the sea on an
errand of old Winter.
And he saw before him the grey silent fog that lay along the tides.
"Way for us," said the North Wind, "O ineffectual fog, for I am
Winter's leader in his age-old war with the ships. I overwhelm them
suddenly in my strength, or drive upon them the huge seafaring bergs. I
cross an ocean while you move a mile. There is mourning in inland
places when I have met the ships. I drive them upon the rocks and feed
the sea. Wherever I appear they bow to our lord the Winter."
And to his arrogant boasting nothing said the fog. Only he rose up
slowly and trailed away from the sea and, crawling up long valleys,
took refuge among the hills; and night came down and everything was
still, and the fog began to mumble in the stillness. And I hear him
telling infamously to himself the tale of his horrible spoils. "A hundred
and fifteen galleons of old Spain, a certain argosy that went from Tyre,
eight fisher-fleets and ninety ships of the line, twelve warships under
sail, with their carronades, three hundred and eighty-seven river-craft,
forty-two merchantmen that carried spice, thirty yachts, twenty-one
battleships of the modern time, nine thousand admirals...." he mumbled
and chuckled on, till I suddenly rose and fled from his fearful
contamination.

THE RAFT-BUILDERS
All we who write put me in mind of sailors hastily making rafts upon
doomed ships.
When we break up under the heavy years and go down into eternity
with all that is ours our thoughts like small lost rafts float on awhile
upon Oblivion's sea. They will not carry much over those tides, our
names and a phrase or two and little else.
They that write as a trade to please the whim of the day, they are like
sailors that work at the rafts only to warm their hands and to distract

their thoughts from their certain doom; their rafts go all to pieces before
the ship breaks up.
See now Oblivion shimmering all around us, its very tranquility
deadlier than tempest. How little all our keels have troubled it. Time in
its deeps swims like a monstrous whale; and, like a whale, feeds on the
littlest things--small tunes and little unskilled songs of the olden,
golden evenings--and anon turneth whale-like to overthrow whole
ships.
See now the wreckage of Babylon floating idly, and something there
that once was Nineveh; already their kings and queens are in the deeps
among the weedy