“Yesterday I blew with all my might until I loosed a field of ice and sent it out to sea. A white bear was on it, and he sailed on his ice-boat across the sea to Iceland. As I passed the steep, high rocks on the shores of Greenland I saw the eider-ducks brooding there. Each one had lined her nest with soft down plucked off of her own breast. Then I frightened them with my hoarse voice, and thousands—yes, hundreds of thousands—rose up in the air like a cloud.”
“But let me ask you,” murmured the south wind, “did you ever hear among your icebergs and your frozen wastes the song of the oriole and the mocking-bird, that I hear every day in the woods where I live? You look at your Esquimaux in their snow houses, but I peep in at the hut of the Indian that stands under the forest shade, or I blow against the sail of his canoe and waft it up some quiet river where the trees grow thick on each side and meet overhead. The red flamingo wades out into the water, and the monkeys and parrots chatter among the branches.
“I see the boa-constrictor coiled among the roots on the shore, or watch the alligator floating down the stream. My home is among the orange trees and in the fields where the sugar-cane grows. There I lie still and sleep, or awake to go forth on my journeys over the earth—not to freeze up the ground and make it barren and bare, but to cover it with green and bring out the buds and flowers on every bush and tree.”
While the winds were talking in this way, the river, that had been listening to them, said: