Many a harassed mother in a mean backyard had looked at five
dwarfish shirts on the clothes-line as at some small, sick tragedy;
it was as if she had hanged her five children. The wind came, and they
were full and kicking as if five fat imps had sprung into them; and far
down in her oppressed subconscious she half-remembered those coarse
comedies of her fathers when the elves still dwelt in the homes of men.
Many an unnoticed girl in a dank walled garden had tossed herself
into the hammock with the same intolerant gesture with which she
might have tossed herself into the Thames; and that wind rent
the waving wall of woods and lifted the hammock like a balloon,
and showed her shapes of quaint clouds far beyond, and pictures
of bright villages far below, as if she rode heaven in a fairy boat.
Many a dusty clerk or cleric, plodding a telescopic road of poplars,
thought for the hundredth time that they were like the plumes
of a hearse; when this invisible energy caught and swung and clashed
them round his head like a wreath or salutation of seraphic wings.
There was in it something more inspired and authoritative even
than the old wind of the proverb; for this was the good wind
that blows nobody harm.

The flying blast struck London just where it scales the northern heights,
terrace above terrace, as precipitous as Edinburgh. It was round
about this place that some poet, probably drunk, looked up astonished
at all those streets gone skywards, and (thinking vaguely of glaciers
and roped mountaineers) gave it the name of Swiss Cottage, which it has
never been able to shake off. At some stage of those heights a terrace
of tall gray houses, mostly empty and almost as desolate as the Grampians,
curved round at the western end, so that the last building, a boarding
establishment called "Beacon House," offered abruptly to the sunset its high,
narrow and towering termination, like the prow of some deserted ship.