Down thro’ the Northlands Come the White Brothers, One clad in foam And one mailed in water-- Foam white as bear-felt, Water like coat of mail. _Snow is the Song of Me_, Singeth the one; _Silence the Breath of Me_, Whispers the other. So sings a Swedish poet, a lineal descendant of one of the Saga-men whose songs the vikings carried to the ends of the world of that day. The song is called ‘The Sons of the North Wind,’ and the allusion is to an old ballad-saga common in one form or another throughout all the countries of both the Gall and the Gael ... from Finland to the last of the island-kingdoms between Ultima Thule and the Gaelic West. The White Brothers are familiar indeed, though with us they come oftener clothed with beauty than with terror, with strange and beautiful new life rather than with the solemnity and dread aspect of death. Among the Gaelic hills we have a prose variant of ‘The Sons of the North Wind,’ which I suppose is still told to children by the fireglow on winter evenings, as, when a child, the present writer was told it and retold it by the fireglow on many a winter evening when the crackling fall of icicles from fir-sprays near the window could be heard, or the sudden shuffle of snow in the declivities of the steep glen hard-by. The story is generally told as a tale, but sometimes the teller chants it as a _duan_ or poem. For it is more a poem than a prose narrative on the lips of Gaelic speakers. The North Wind had three sons. These Sons of the North Wind were called White-Feet and White-Wings and White-Hands. When White-Feet and White-Wings and White-Hands first came into our world from the invisible palaces, they were so beautiful that many mortals died from beholding them, while others dared not look, but fled affrighted into woods or obscure places. So when these three sons of the Great Chieftain saw that they were too radiant for the eyes of the earth-bound they receded beyond the gates of the sunset, and took counsel with the Allfather. When, through the gates of dawn, they came again they were no longer visible to men, nor, in all the long grey reaches of the years, has any since been seen of mortal eyes. How are they known, these Sons of the North Wind? They were known of old, they are known still, only by the white feet of one treading the waves of the sea; and by the white rustle and sheen of a myriad tiny plumes as the other unfolds great pinions above hills and valleys, woodlands and garths, and the homes of men; and by the white silence of dream that the third lays upon moving waters, and the windless boughs of trees, upon the reed by the silent loch, upon the grass by the silent tarn, upon the bracken by the unfalling hill-stream hanging like a scarf among the rock and mountain-ash. We know them no more by their ancient names or in their immortal body, but only thus by the radiance of their passing, and we call them the Polar Wind, and Snow, and Ice.