‘Of course you do!’ said the wind, cordially. ‘Come along. Get into your things, and we’ll make a beginning.’
So Sep dressed, and he wrote on his slate in [p130 very big letters, ‘Gone to seek our fortune,’ and he put it on the table so that his mother should see it when she came down in the morning. And he went out of the cottage and the wind kindly shut the door after him.
The wind gently pushed him down to the shore, and there he got into his father’s boat, which was called the Septimus and Susie, after his father and mother, and the wind carried him across to another country and there he landed.
‘Now,’ said the wind, clapping him on the back, ‘off you go, and good luck to you!’
And it turned round and took the boat home again.
When Sep’s mother found the writing on the slate, and his father found the boat gone they feared that Sep was drowned, but when the wind brought the boat back wrong way up, they were quite sure, and they both cried for many a long day.
The wind tried to tell them that Sep was all right, but they couldn’t understand wind-talk, and they only said, ‘Drat the wind,’ and fastened the shutters up tight, and put wedges in the windows.
Sep walked along the straight white road that led across the new country. He had no more idea how to look for his fortune than you would have if you suddenly left off reading [p131 this and went out of your front door to seek yours.
However, he had made a start, and that is always something. When he had gone exactly seven miles on that straight foreign road, between strange trees, and bordered with flowers he did not know the names of, he heard a groaning in the wood, and some one sighing and saying, ‘Oh, how hard it is, to have to die and never see my wife and the little cubs again.’
The voice was rough as a lion’s mane, and strong as a lion’s claws, and Sep was very frightened. But he said, ‘I’m not afraid,’ and then oddly enough he found he had spoken the truth—he wasn’t afraid.