But, alas, only ‘days.’ It has not been the September of the heart’s desire, of the poet’s dream. The advance-guard of the equinox has again and again come in force: the grey wind has wailed from height to height, and moaned among the woods. Even in the gardens the wall-fruits have hardly given the wonted rich warmth, though the apples have made a brave show. Yesterday there was a hush in the wind; a delicate frost lingered after a roseflusht dawn; and the inward light came out of the heather, the bracken and the gorse, out of the yellow limes and the amber planes and the changing oaks, and upon the hillside turned the great pine on the further crag into a column of pale gold and made the lichened boulders like the half-sunken gates of buried cities of topaz and jasper and chalcedony. But to-day vast masses of sombre cloud have been swung inland from the Atlantic, and the gale has the wild mournful sough that we look for in the dark months. It is in the firelight that one must recapture September. It lies hidden in that warm heart, amid the red and yellow flowers of flame: and in that other heart, which, also, has its ‘darke fyre,’ that heart in whose lands lit by neither sun nor moon are the secret glens where old dreams live again, and where the dreams of the hour are radiant in their new wonder and their new beauty. THE CHILDREN OF WIND AND THE CLAN OF PEACE I was abroad on the moors one day in the company of a shepherd, and we were talking of the lapwing that were plentiful there, and were that day wailing continuously in an uneasy wavering flight. I had seen them act thus, in this excess of alarm, in this prolonged restless excitement, when the hill-falcons were hovering overhead in the nesting season: and, again, just before the unloosening of wind and rain and the sudden fires of the thundercloud. But John Logan the shepherd told me that now it was neither coming lightnings nor drifting hawk nor eagle that made all this trouble among the ‘peewits.’ “The wind’s goin’ to mak’ a sudden veer,” he said--adding abruptly a little later, “an’ by the same token we’ll have rain upon us soon.” I looked at the cold blue of the sky, and at the drift of the few clouds trailing out of the east or south-east, and could see no sign of any change of wind or likelihood of rain. “What makes you think that?” I asked. “Weel,” he answered literally, “I don’t think it. It’s the peewits an’ the craws that ken swifter than oursels; it’s they that tell, an’ I think they’re better at the business than thae folk wha haver awa’ in the papers, an’ are sometimes richt because they canna help it an’ oftener wrang because it’s maistly guesswork.” “Well, what do the peewits and the crows say?--though I haven’t seen crow or rook or corbie for the last hour.”