What made the winds and clouds so perverse, the clerk of the weather
best knows; but there was a reason for the unreasonableness of the
windmiller's wife.

She had lost her child, her youngest born, and therefore, at
present, her best beloved. This girl-babe was the sixth of the
windmiller and his wife's children, the last that God gave them, and
the first that it had pleased Him to take away.

The mother had been weak herself at the time that the baby fell ill,
and unusually ill-fitted to bear a heavy blow. Then her watchful
eyes had seen symptoms of ailing in the child long before the
windmiller's good sense would allow a fuss to be made, and expense
to be incurred about a little peevishness up or down. And it was
some words muttered by the doctor when he did come, about not having
been sent for soon enough, which were now doing as much as any thing
to drive the poor woman frantic. They struck a blow, too, at her
blind belief in the miller's invariable wisdom. If he had but
listened to her in this matter, were it only for love's sake! There
was something, she thought, in what that woman had said who came to
help her with the last offices,--the miller discouraged "neighbors,"
but this was a matter of decency,--that it was as foolish for a man
to have the say over babies and housework as it would be for his
wife to want her word in the workshop or the mill.

Perhaps a state of subjection for grown-up people does not tend to
make them reasonable, especially in their indignations. The
windmiller's wife dared not, for her life, have told him in so many
words that she thought it would be for their joint benefit if he