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Everything possible to be believed is an image of truth.

—BLAKE.

For some days after that Paul walked on air. Incredible as it may seem to normally constituted persons, he was so delighted to have found a medium in which he could in some measure express himself without fear of ridicule, that the entire world was made anew for him. He thought about it a great deal. He even argued in his muddled fashion, but he got no farther that way. The only thing he really understood was the plain fact that he had found a region where his companions were about his own age, with his own tastes, ready to consider things that were real, and to let the trivial and vulgar world go by.

This was the fact that stared him in the face and made him happy. For the first time in his life he could play with others. Hitherto he had played alone.

'It's a safety-valve at last,' he exclaimed, using his favourite word. 'Now I can let myself go a bit.

They will never laugh; on the contrary, they'll understand and love it. Hooray!'

'And, remember,' Nixie had again explained to him, 'you have to write down all the aventures. That's what keeping the records means. And you must read them out to us at the Meetings.'

And he chuckled as he thought about it, for it meant having real Reports to write at last, reports that others would read and appreciate.

The aventures, moreover, began very quickly; they came thick and fast; and he lived in them so intensely that he carried them over into his other dull world, and sometimes hardly knew which world he was in at all. His imagination, hungry and untamed, had escaped, and was seeking all it could devour.

It was a hot afternoon in mid-June, and Paul was lying with his pipe upon the lawn. His sister was out driving. He was alone with the children and the smaller portion of the menagerie,—smaller in size, that is, not in numbers; cats, kittens, and puppies were either asleep, or on the hunt, all about them. And from an open window a parrot was talking ridiculously in mixed French and English.

The giant cedars spread their branches; in the limes the bees hummed drowsily; the world lay a scented garden around him, and a very soft wind stole to and fro, stirring the bushes with sleepy murmurs and making the flowers nod.

China and Japan lay panting in the shade behind him, and not far off reposed the big grey Persian, Mrs. Tompkyns. Regardless of the heat, Pouf, Zezette, and Dumps flitted here and there as though the whole lawn was specially made for their games; and Smoke, the black cat, dignified and mysterious, lay with eyes half-closed just near enough for Paul to stroke his sleek, hot sides when he felt so disposed. He—Smoke that is—blinked indifferently at passing butterflies, or twitched his great tail at the very tip when a bird settled in the branches overhead; but for the most part he was intent upon other matters—matters of genuine importance that concerned none but himself.

A few yards off Jonah and Toby were doing something with daisies—what it was Paul could not see; and on his other side Nixie lay flat upon the grass and gazed into the sky. The governess was—where all governesses should be out of lesson-time—elsewhere.

'Nixie, you're sleeping. Wake up.'

She rolled over towards him. 'No, Uncle Paul, I'm not. I was only thinking.'

'Thinking of what?'

'Oh, clouds and things; chiefly clouds, I think.' She pointed to the white battlements of summer that were passing very slowly over the heavens. 'It's so funny that you can see them move, yet can't see the thing that pushes them along.' 'Wind, you mean? '

'H'mmmmm.'

They lay flat on their backs and watched. Nixie made a screen of her hair and peered through it. Paul did the same with his fingers.

'You can touch it, and smell it, and hear it,' she went on, half to herself, 'but you can't see it.'

'I suspect there are creatures that can see the wind, though,' he remarked sleepily.

'I 'spect so too,' she said softly. 'I think I could if I really tried hard enough. If I was very, oh very kind and gentle and polite to it, I think '

'Come and tell me quietly,' Paul said with excitement. 'I believe you're right.'

He scented a delightful aventure. The child turned over on the grass twice, roller fashion, and landed against him, lying on her face with her chin in her hands and her heels clicking softly in the air.

She began to explain what she meant. 'You must listen properly because it's rather difficult to explain, you know'; he heard her breathing into his ear, and then her voice grew softer and fainter as she went on. Lower and lower it grew, murmuring like a distant mill-wheel, softer and softer; wonderful sentences and words all running gently into each other without pause, somewhere below ground. It began to sound far away, and it melted into the humming of the bees in the lime trees. . . . Once or twice it stopped altogether, Paul thought, so that he missed whole sentences. . . . Gaps came, gaps filled with no definite words, but only the inarticulate murmur of summer and summer life. . . .

Then, without warning, he became conscious of a curious sinking sensation, as though the solid lawn beneath him had begun to undulate. The turf grew soft like air, and swam up over him in green waves till his head was covered. His ears became muffled; Nixie's voice no longer reached him as something outside himself; it was within—curiously running, so to speak, with his blood. He sank deeper and deeper into a delicious, soothing medium that both covered and penetrated him.

The child had him by the hand, that was all he knew, then—a long sliding motion, and forget-fulness.

'I'm off,' he remembered thinking, 'off at last into a real aventure!'

Down they sank, down, down; through soft darkness, and long, shadowy places, passing through endless scented caverns, and along dim avenues that stretched, for ever and ever it seemed, beneath the gloom of mighty trees. The air was cool and perfumed with earth. They were in some underworld, strangely muted, soundless, mysterious. It grew very dark.

'Where are we, Nixie?' He did not feel alarm; but a sense of wonder, touched delightfully by awe, had begun to send thrills along his nerves. Her reply in his ear was like a voice in a tiny trumpet, far away, very soft. 'Come along! Follow me!'

'I'm coming. But it's so dark.'

'Hush,' she whispered. 'We're in a dream together. I'm not sure where exactly. Keep close to me.'

'I'm coming,' he repeated, blundering over the roots beside her; 'but where are we? I can't see a bit.'

'Tread softly. We're in a lost forest—just before the dawn,' he heard her voice answer faintly.

'A forest underground? You mean a coal measure?' he asked in amazement.

She made no answer. 'I think we're going to see the wind,' she added presently.

Her words thrilled him inexplicably. It was as if—in that other world of gross values—some one had said, 'You're going to make a million!' It was all hushed and soft and subdued. Everything had a coating of plush.

'We've gone backwards somewhere—a great many years. But it's all right. There's no time in dreams.'

'It's dreadfully dark,' he whispered, tripping again.

The persuasion of her little hand led him along over roots and through places of deep moss. Great spaces, he felt, were about him. Shadows coated everything with silence. It was like the vast primeval forests of his country across the seas. The map of the world had somehow shifted, and here, in little England, he found the freedom of those splendid scenes of desolation that he craved. Millions of huge trees reared up about them through the gloom, and he felt their presence, though invisible.

'The sun isn't up yet,' she added after a bit. He held her hand tightly, as they stumbled slowly forward together side by side. He began to feel extraordinarily alive. Exhilaration seized him. He could have shouted with excitement.

'Hush!' whispered his guide, 'do be careful. You'll upset us both.' The trembling of his hand betrayed him. 'You stumble like an om'ibus! '

'I'm all right. Go ahead!' he replied under his breath. 'I can see better now!'

'Now look,' she said, stopping in front of him and turning round.

The darkness lifted somewhat as he bent down to follow the direction of her gaze. On every side, dim and thronging, he saw the stems of immense trees rising upwards into obscurity. There were hundreds upon hundreds of them. His eyes followed their outline till the endless number bewildered him. Overhead, the stars were shining faintly through the tangled network of their branches. Odours of earth and moss and leaves, cool and delicate, rose about them; vast depths of silence stretched away in every direction. Great ferns stood motionless, with all the magic of frosted window-panes, among their roots. All was still and dark and silent. It was the heart of a great forest before the dawn—prehistoric, unknown to man.

'Oh, I wonder—I wonder 'began Paul,

groping about him clumsily with his hands to feel the way.

'Oh, please don't talk so loud,' Nixie whispered, pinching his arm; 'we shall wake up if you do. Only people in dreams come to places like this.'

'You know the place?' he exclaimed with increasing excitement. 'So do I almost. I'm sure this has all happened before, only I can't remember '

'We must keep as still as mice.'

'We are—still as mice.'

'This is where the winds sleep when they're not blowing. It's their resting-place.'

He looked about him, drawing a deep breath. 'Look out; you'll wake them if you breathe like that? whispered the child.

'Are they asleep now? '

'Of course. Can't you see?'

'Not much—yet!'

'Move like a cat, and speak in whispers. We may see them when they wake.'

'How soon?' 'Dawn. The wind always wakes with the sun. It's getting closer now.'

It was very wonderful. No words can describe adequately the still splendour of that vast forest as they stood there, waiting for the sunrise. Nothing stirred. The trees were carved out of some marvellous dream-stuff, motionless, yet conveying the impression of life. Paul knew it and recognised it. All primeval woods possess that quality—trees that know nothing of men and have never heard the ringing of the axe. The silence was of death, yet a sense of life that is far beyond death pulsed through it. Cisterns of quiet, gigantic, primitive life lay somewhere hidden in these shadowed glades. It seemed the counterpart of a man's soul before rude passion and power have stirred it into activity. Here all slept potentially, as in a human soul. The huge, sombre pines rose from their beds of golden moss to shake their crests faintly to the stars, awaiting the coming of the true passion—the great Sun of life, that should call them to splendour, to reality, and to the struggle of a bigger life than they yet knew, when they might even try to shake free from their roots in the hard, confining earth, and fly to the source of their existence—the sun.

And the sun was coming now. The dawn was at hand. The trees moved gently together, it seemed. The wood grew lighter. An almost imperceptible shudder ran through it as through a vast spider's web.

'Look!' cried Nixie. His simple, intuitive little guide was nearer, after all, to reality than he was, for all his subtle vision. 'Look, Uncle Paul!'

His attempt to analyse wonder had prevented his seeing it sooner, but as she spoke he became aware that something very unusual was going forward about them. His skin began to tickle, and a strange sense of excitement took possession of him.

A pale, semi-transparent substance he saw hung everywhere in the air about them, clinging in spirals and circles to the trunks, and hanging down from the branches in long slender ribbons that reached almost to the ground. The colour was a delicate pearl-grey. It covered everything as with the softest of filtered light, and hung motionless ins the air in painted streamers of thinnest possible vapour.

The silken threads of these gossamer ribbons dropped from the sky in millions upon millions. They wrapped themselves round the very star-beams, and lay in sheets upon the ground; they curled themselves round the stones and crept in among the tiniest crevices of moss and bark; they clothed the ferns with their fairy gauze. Paul could even feel them coiling about his hair and beard and eyelashes. They pervaded the entire scene as light does. The colour was uniform; whether in sheets or ribbons, it did not vary in shade or in degree of transparency. The entire atmosphere was pervaded by it, frozen into absolute stillness.

'That's the winds—all that stuff,' Nixie whispered, her voice trembling with excitement. 'They're asleep still. Aren't they awful and wonderful?'

As she spoke a faint vibration ran everywhere through the ribbons. Involuntarily he tightened his grasp on the child's hand.

'That's their beginning to wake,' she said, drawing closer to him, 'like people moving in sleep.'

The vibration ran through the air again. It quivered as reflections in the surface of a pool quiver to a ghost of passing wind. They seated themselves on a fallen trunk and waited. The trees waited too; as gigantic notes in a set piece, Paul thought, that the coming sun would presently play upon like a hand upon a vast instrument. Then something -moved a few feet away, and he jumped in spite of himself.

'Only Jonah,' explained his guide. 'He's asleep like us. Don't wake him; he's having a dream too.'

It was indeed Jonah, wandering vaguely this way and that, disappearing and reappearing, wholly unaware, it seemed, of their presence. He looked like a gnome. His feet made no sound as he moved about, and after a few minutes he lost himself behind a big trunk and they saw him no more. But almost at once behind him the round figures of China and Japan emerged into view. They came, moving fast and busily, blundering against the trees, tumbling down, and butting into everything that came in their path as though they could not see properly. Paul watched them with astonishment.

'They're only half asleep, and that's why they see so badly,' Nixie told him. 'Aren't they silly and happy?'

Before he could answer, something else moved into their limited field of vision, and he was aware that a silent grey shadow was stalking solemnly by. All dignity and self- confidence it was; stately, proud, sure of itself, in a region where it was at home, conscious of its power to see and move better than any one else. Two wide-open and brilliant eyes, shining like dropped stars, were turned for a moment towards them where they sat on the log and watched. Then, silent and beautiful, it passed on into the darkness beyond, and vanished from their sight.

'Mrs. Tompkyns!' whispered Nixie. 'She saw us all right!'

'Splendid!' he exclaimed under his breath, full of admiration.

Nixie pinched his arm. A change had come about in the last few minutes, and into this dense forest the light of approaching dawn began to steal most wonderfully. A universal murmuring filled the air.

'The sun's coming. They're going to wake now!' The child gave a little shiver of delight. Paul sat up. A general, indefinable motion, he saw, was beginning everywhere to run to and fro among the hanging streamers. More light penetrated every minute, and the tree stems began to turn from black to purple, and then from purple to faint grey. Vistas of shadowy glades began to open up on all sides; every instant the trees stood out more distinctly. The myriad threads and ribbons were astir.

'Look!' cried the child aloud; 'they're uncurling as they wake.'

He looked. The sense of wonder and beauty moved profoundly in his heart. Where, oh where, in all the dreams of his solitary years had he seen anything to equal this unearthly vision of the awakening winds?

The winds moved in their sleep, and awoke.

In loops, folds, and spirals of indescribable grace they slowly began to unwrap themselves from the tree stems with a million little delicate undulations; like thin mist trembling, and then smoothing out the ruffled surface of their thousand serpentine eddies, they slid swiftly upwards from the moss and ferns, disentangled themselves without effort from roots and stones and bark, and then, reinforced by countless thousands from the lower branches, they rose up slowly in vast coloured sheets towards the region of the tree tops.

And, as they rose, the silence of the forest passed into sound—trembling and murmuring at first, and then rapidly increasing in volume as the distant glades sent their voices to swell it, and the note of every hollow and dell joined in with its contributory note. From all the shadowy recesses of the wood they heard it come, louder and louder, leaping to the centre like running great arpeggios, and finally merging all lesser notes in the wave of a single dominant chord—the song of the awakened winds to the dawn.

'They're singing to the sun,' Nixie whispered. Her voice caught in her throat a little and she tightened her grasp on his big hand.

'They're changing colour too,' he answered breathlessly. They stood up on their log to see.

'It's the rate they go does that,' she tried to explain. She stood on tiptoe.

He understood what she meant, for he now saw that as the wind rose in ribbons, streams and spirals, the original pearl-grey changed chromatically into every shade of colour under the sun.

'Same as metals getting hot,' she said. 'Their colour comes 'cording to their speed.'

Many of the tints he found it impossible to name, for they were such as he had never dreamed of. Crimsons, purples, soft yellows, exquisite greens and pinks ran to and fro in a perfect deluge of colour, as though a hundred sunsets had been let loose and were hunting wildly for the West to set in. And there were shades of opal and mother-of-pearl so delicate that he could only perceive them in his bewildered mind by translating them into the world of sound, and imagining it was the colour of their own singing.

Far too rapidly for description they changed their protean dress, moving faster and faster, glowing fiercely one minute and fading away the next, passing swiftly into new and dazzling brilliancies as the distant winds came to join them, and at length rushing upwards in one huge central draught through the trees, shouting their song with a roar like the sea.

Suddenly they swept up into the sky—sound, colour and all—and silence once more descended upon the forest. The winds were off and about their business of the day. The woods were empty. And the sun was at the very edge of the world.

'Watch the tops of the trees now,' cried Nixie, still trembling from the strange wonder of the scene. 'The Little Winds will wake the moment the sun touches them—the little winds in the tops of the trees.'

As she spoke, the sun came up and his first rays touched the pointed crests above them with gold; and Paul noticed that there were thousands of tiny, slender ribbons streaming out like elastic threads from the tips of all the pines, and that these had only just begun to move. As at a word of command they trooped out to meet the sunshine, undulating like wee coloured serpents, and uttering their weird and gentle music at the same time. And Paul, as he listened, understood at last why the wind in the tree-tops is always more delicately sweet than any other kind, and why it touches so poignantly the heart of him who hears, and calls wonder from her deepest lair.

'The young winds, you see,' Nixie said, peering up beneath her joined hands and finding it difficult to keep her balance as she did so. 'They sleep longer than the others. And they're not loose either; they're fastened on, and can only go out and come back.'

And, as he watched, he saw these young winds fly out miles into the brightening sky, making lines of flashing colour, and then tear back with a whirring rush of music to curl up again round the twigs and pine needles.

'Though sometimes they do manage to get loose, and make funny storms and hurricanes and things that no one expects at all in the sky.'

Paul was on the point of replying to this explanation when something struck against his legs, and he only just saved himself from falling by seizing Nixie and risking a flying leap with her from the log. 'It's that wicked Japan again,' she laughed, clambering back on to the tree.

The puppy was vigorously chasing its own tail, bumping as it did so into everything within reach. Paul stooped to catch it. At the same instant it rose up past his very nose, and floated off through the trees and was lost to view in the sky.

Nixie laughed merrily. 'It woke in the middle of its silly little dream,' she said. 'It was only half-asleep really, and playing. It won't come back now.'

'All puppies are absurd like that '

But he did not finish his profound observation about puppies, for his voice at that moment was drowned in a new and terrible noise that seemed to come from the heart of the wood. It happened just as in a children's fairy tale. It bore no resemblance to the roar the winds made; there was no music in it; it was crude in quality—angry; a sound from another place.

It came swiftly nearer and nearer, increasing in volume as it came. A veil seemed to spread suddenly over the scene; the trees grew shadowy and dim; the glades melted off into mistiness; and ever the mass of sound came pouring up towards them. Paul realised that the frontiers of consciousness were shifting again in a most extraordinary fashion, so that the whole forest slipped off into the background and became a dim map in his memory, faint and unreal—and, with it, went both Nixie and himself. The ground rose and fell under their feet. Her hand melted into something fluid and slippery as he tried to keep his hold upon it. The child whispered words he could not catch. Then, like the puppy, they both began to rise.

The roar came out to meet them and enveloped them furiously in mid air.

'At any rate, we've seen the wind!' he heard the child's voice murmuring in his beard. She rose away from him, being lighter, and vanished through the tops of the trees.

And then the roar drowned him and swept him away in a whirling tempest, so that he lost all consciousness of self and forgot everything he had ever known. . . .

The noise resolved itself gradually into the crunching sounds of the carriage wheels and the clatter of horses' hoofs coming up the gravel drive.

Paul looked about him with a sigh that was half a yawn. China and Japan were still romping on the lawn, Mrs. Tompkyns and Smoke were curled up in hot, soft circles precisely where they had been before, Toby and Jonah were still busily engaged doing 'something with daisies' in the full blaze of the sunshine, and Nixie lay beside him, all innocence and peace, still gazing through the tangle of her yellow hair at the slow-sailing clouds overhead.

And the clouds, he noticed, had hardly altered a line of their shape and position since he saw them last.

He turned with a jump of excitement.

'Nixie,' he exclaimed, 'I've seen the wind!'

She rolled over lazily on her side and fixed her great blue eyes on his own, between two strands of her hair. From the expression of her brown face it was possible to surmise that she knew nothing—and everything.

'Have you?' she said very quietly. 'I thought you might.'

'Yes, but did I dream it, or imagine it, or just think it and make it up?' He still felt a little bewildered; the memory of that strangely beautiful picture-gallery still haunted him. Yonder, before the porch, the steaming horses and the smart coachman on the box, and his sister coming across the lawn from the carriage all belonged to another world, while he himself and Nixie and the other children still stayed with him, floating in a golden atmosphere where Wind was singing and alive.

'That doesn't matter a bit,' she replied, peering at him gravely before she pulled her hair over both eyes. 'The point is that it's really true! Now,' she added, her face completely hidden by the yellow web, 'all you have to do is to write it for our next Meeting—write the record of your Aventure '

And read it out? 'he said, beginning to understand. The yellow head nodded. He felt utterly and delightfully bewitched.

'All right,' he said; «I will.'

'And make it a very wonderful indeed Aventure,' she added, springing to her feet. 'Hush! Here's mother!'

Paul rose dizzily to greet his sister, while the children ran off with their animals to other things.

'You've had a pleasant afternoon, Paul, dear?' she asked.

'Oh, very nice indeed 'His thoughts were still entangled with the wind and with the story he meant to write about it for the next Meeting.

She opened her parasol and held it over her head.

'Now, come indoors,' he went on, collecting himself with an effort, 'or into the shade. This heat is not good for you, Margaret.' He looked at her pale, delicate face. 'You're tired too.'

'I enjoyed the drive,' she replied, letting him take her arm and lead her towards the house. 'I met the Burdens in their motor. They're coming over to luncheon one day, they said. You'll like him, I think.'

'That's very nice,' he remarked again, 'very nice. Margaret,' he exclaimed suddenly, ashamed of his utter want of interest in all she was planning for him, 'I think you ought to have a motor too. I'm going to give you one.'

'That is sweet of you, Paul,' she smiled at him. 'But really, you know, one likes horses best. They're much quieter. Motors do shake one so.'

'I don't think that matters; the point is that it's really true,' he muttered to himself, thinking of Nixie's judgment of his Aventure.

His sister looked at him with her expression of faint amusement.

'You mustn't mind me,' he laughed, planting her in a deck-chair by the shade of the house; 'but the truth is, my mind is full just now of some work I've got to do—a report, in fact, I've got to write.'

He went off into the house, humming a song. She followed him with her eyes.

'He is so strange. I do wish he would see more people and be a little more normal.'

And in Paul's mind, as he raced along the passage to his private study in search of pen and paper, there ran a thought of very different kind in the shape of a sentence from the favourite of all his books:

'Everything possible to be believed is an image of truth.'