and spray before your gaze, but the Eastern interloper of the
narrow seas, when he has mustered his courage and cruelty to the
point of a gale, puts your eyes out, puts them out completely,
makes you feel blind for life upon a lee-shore. It is the wind,
also, that brings snow.

Out of his black and merciless heart he flings a white blinding
sheet upon the ships of the sea. He has more manners of villainy,
and no more conscience than an Italian prince of the seventeenth
century. His weapon is a dagger carried under a black cloak when
he goes out on his unlawful enterprises. The mere hint of his
approach fills with dread every craft that swims the sea, from
fishing-smacks to four-masted ships that recognise the sway of the
West Wind. Even in his most accommodating mood he inspires a dread
of treachery. I have heard upwards of ten score of windlasses
spring like one into clanking life in the dead of night, filling
the Downs with a panic-struck sound of anchors being torn hurriedly
out of the ground at the first breath of his approach.
Fortunately, his heart often fails him: he does not always blow
home upon our exposed coast; he has not the fearless temper of his
Westerly brother.

The natures of those two winds that share the dominions of the
great oceans are fundamentally different. It is strange that the
winds which men are prone to style capricious remain true to their
character in all the various regions of the earth. To us here, for
instance, the East Wind comes across a great continent, sweeping
over the greatest body of solid land upon this earth. For the
Australian east coast the East Wind is the wind of the ocean,
coming across the greatest body of water upon the globe; and yet