their cones. "Blow stronger, blow fiercer, slow air-mothers, and
shake us from our prisons of dead wood, that we may fly and spin
away north-eastward, each on his horny wing. Help us but to touch
the moorland yonder, and we will take good care of ourselves
henceforth; we will dive like arrows through the heather, and
drive our sharp beaks into the soil, and rise again as green trees
toward the sunlight, and spread out lusty boughs."

They never think, bold fools, of what is coming to bring them low
in the midst of their pride; of the reckless axe which will fell
them, and the saw which will shape them into logs; and the trains
which will roar and rattle over them, as they lie buried in the
gravel of the way, till they are ground and rotted into powder,
and dug up and flung upon the fire, that they too may return home,
like all things, and become air and sunlight once again.

And the air-mothers hear their prayers, and do their bidding: but
faintly; for they themselves are tired and sad.

Tired and sad are the air-mothers, and their gardens rent and wan.
Look at them as they stream over the black forest, before the dim
south-western sun; long lines and wreaths of melancholy grey,
stained with dull yellow or dead dun. They have come far across
the seas, and done many a wild deed upon their way; and now that
they have reached the land, like shipwrecked sailors, they will
lie down and weep till they can weep no more.

Ah, how different were those soft air-mothers when, invisible to
mortal eyes, they started on their long sky-journey, five thousand
miles across the sea! Out of the blazing caldron which lies