the West Wind's dominions most thickly populated with generations
of fine ships and hardy men. Heroic deeds and adventurous exploits

have been performed there, within the very stronghold of his sway.
The best sailors in the world have been born and bred under the

shadow of his sceptre, learning to manage their ships with skill
and audacity before the steps of his stormy throne. Reckless

adventurers, toiling fishermen, admirals as wise and brave as the
world has ever known, have waited upon the signs of his westerly

sky. Fleets of victorious ships have hung upon his breath. He has
tossed in his hand squadrons of war-scarred three-deckers, and

shredded out in mere sport the bunting of flags hallowed in the
traditions of honour and glory. He is a good friend and a

dangerous enemy, without mercy to unseaworthy ships and faint-
hearted seamen. In his kingly way he has taken but little account

of lives sacrificed to his impulsivepolicy; he is a king with a
double-edged sword bared in his right hand. The East Wind, an

interloper in the dominions of Westerly weather, is an impassive-
faced tyrant with a sharp poniard held behind his back for a

treacherous stab.
In his forays into the North Atlantic the East Wind behaves like a

subtle and cruel adventurer without a notion of honour or fair
play. Veiling his clear-cut, lean face in a thin layer of a hard,

high cloud, I have seen him, like a wizened robber sheik of the
sea, hold up large caravans of ships to the number of three hundred

or more at the very gates of the English Channel. And the worst of
it was that there was no ransom that we could pay to satisfy his

avidity; for whatever evil is wrought by the raiding East Wind, it
is done only to spite his kingly brother of the West. We gazed

helplessly at the systematic, cold, gray-eyed obstinacy of the
Easterly weather, while short rations became the order of the day,

and the pinch of hunger under the breast-bone grew familiar to
every sailor in that held-up fleet. Every day added to our

numbers. In knots and groups and straggling parties we flung to
and fro before the closed gate. And meantime the outward-bound

ships passed, running through our humiliated ranks under all the
canvas they could show. It is my idea that the Easterly Wind helps

the ships away from home in the wicked hope that they shall all
come to an untimely end and be heard of no more. For six weeks did

the robber sheik hold the trade route of the earth, while our liege
lord, the West Wind, slept profoundly like a tired Titan, or else

remained lost in a mood of idle sadness known only to frank
natures. All was still to the westward; we looked in vain towards

his stronghold: the King slumbered on so deeply that he let his
foraging brother steal the very mantle of gold-lined purple clouds

from his bowed shoulders. What had become of the dazzling hoard of
royal jewels exhibited at every close of day? Gone, disappeared,

extinguished, carried off without leaving a single gold band or the
flash of a single sunbeam in the evening sky! Day after day

through a cold streak of heavens as bare and poor as the inside of
a rifled safe a rayless and despoiled sun would slink shamefacedly,

without pomp or show, to hide in haste under the waters. And still
the King slept on, or mourned the vanity of his might and his

power, while the thin-lipped intruder put the impress of his cold
and implacable spirit upon the sky and sea. With every daybreak

the rising sun had to wade through a crimsonstream, luminous and
sinister, like the spilt blood of celestial bodies murdered during

the night.
In this particular instance the mean interloper held the road for

some six weeks on end, establishing his particular administrative
methods over the best part of the North Atlantic. It looked as if

the easterly weather had come to stay for ever, or, at least, till
we had all starved to death in the held-up fleet - starved within

sight, as it were, of plenty, within touch, almost, of the
bountiful heart of the Empire. There we were, dotting with our

white dry sails the hard blueness of the deep sea. There we were,
a growing company of ships, each with her burden of grain, of

timber, of wool, of hides, and even of oranges, for we had one or
two belated fruit schooners in company. There we were, in that

memorable spring of a certain year in the late seventies, dodging
to and fro, baffled on every tack, and with our stores running down

to sweepings of bread-lockers and scrapings of sugar-casks. It was
just like the East Wind's nature to inflictstarvation upon the

bodies of unoffending sailors, while he corrupted their simple
souls by an exasperation leading to outbursts of profanity as lurid

as his blood-red sunrises. They were followed by gray days under
the cover of high, motionless clouds that looked as if carved in a

slab of ash-coloured marble. And each mean starved sunset left us
calling with imprecations upon the West Wind even in its most

veiled misty mood to wake up and give us our liberty, if only to
rush on and dash the heads of our ships against the very walls of

our unapproachable home.
XXIX.

In the atmosphere of the Easterly weather, as pellucid as a piece
of crystal and refracting like a prism, we could see the appalling

numbers of our helpless company, even to those who in more normal
conditions would have remained invisible, sails down under the

horizon. It is the malicious pleasure of the East Wind to augment
the power of your eyesight, in order, perhaps, that you should see

better the perfect humiliation, the hopelesscharacter of your
captivity. Easterly weather is generally clear, and that is all

that can be said for it - almost supernaturally clear when it
likes; but whatever its mood, there is something uncanny in its

nature. Its duplicity is such that it will deceive a scientific
instrument. No barometer will give warning of an easterly gale,

were it ever so wet. It would be an unjust and ungrateful thing to
say that a barometer is a stupidcontrivance. It is simply that

the wiles of the East Wind are too much for its fundamental
honesty. After years and years of experience the most trusty

instrument of the sort that ever went to sea screwed on to a ship's
cabin bulkhead will, almost invariably, be induced to rise by the

diabolic ingenuity of the Easterly weather, just at the moment when
the Easterly weather, discarding its methods of hard, dry,

impassive cruelty, contemplates drowning what is left of your
spirit in torrents of a peculiarly cold and horrid rain. The

sleet-and-hail squalls following the lightning at the end of a
westerly gale are cold and benumbing and stinging and cruel enough.

But the dry, Easterly weather, when it turns to wet, seems to rain
poisoned showers upon your head. It is a sort of steady,

persistent, overwhelming, endlessly driving downpour, which makes
your heart sick, and opens it to dismal forebodings. And the

stormy mood of the Easterly weather looms black upon the sky with a
peculiar and amazingblackness. The West Wind hangs heavy gray

curtains of mist 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 fearlesstemper 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

here and there its characteristics remain the same with a strange