One exception to this rule of accuracy is when the storm center, instead of reasonably and politely following the usual route, skips suddenly out to sea by way of Hatteras and goes roaring up the easterly edge of the Gulf Stream. That is when the weather signs that you find on the southeast corner of the front page, evening edition, fail, for that is when we catch our unexpected northeaster. “Back to the wind in the northern hemisphere,” says the rule, “and the storm center is on your left.” So, with the wind whirling its thousand-mile circuit about this mysterious center halfway across the Atlantic, we get it from the northeast, and it brings whiffs of mid-ocean spume to our nostrils that are weary of the summer’s heat, and clothes all the land with the gray mists out of which grew the Norse sagas. On days when the northeaster sings along the Gloucester shore, tears white wraiths off the red rocks of Marblehead and Nahant, and spins them in beaten spume along the gray sands of Nantasket, we of the inland country tread our heat-browned pastures with lifted heads, watching mysterious vapors wrap the land in legend, breathing the same air as the stormy petrel, and knowing that in our hearts the strong pulse beats with the blood of vikings. On such days I love to watch the pond shore and the reedy stretches of the meadow marsh, for to them come the first of the wild migrants of autumn, and in the northeaster you may exchange greetings with the winter yellow-legs, just down from the Arctic shore. To-day I heard them, high in the invisible realms of the upper mists, whirling down to me,--gray forms out of a gray sky that seemed to loose them as it later will loose snowflakes. Their staccato whistle in its minor chromatics shrills forth four notes over and over again,--notes lonesome with the heartache of northern barrens, wild as the echoes of ice cliffs that never rang responsive to voices other than those of the eerie birds of Arctic seas; a high-pitched plaint that might well be the shrilling of a little lost wind crying for its mother. You may imitate this whistle well enough to deceive the birds and bring them swirling within range of your gun if you will, though you can never put into it the wild plaint that echoes of far-off, lonely spaces.