2. A jasper floor on which the grain lies like sunshine, and where golden flails, falling swiftly, beat out the grain to mellow music, gleams with increasing brightness. 3. The great mansion shines with its long corridors, its gleaming porticos and polished pavement, all beautiful and hard and cool. Inside is spread a fragrant feast to which seven angels sing invitation with their silver clarions. Softly the invited guests float in, a multitude in number, but silently as the stars move in heaven. Sweet music floats around the beautiful room, and smiling faces nod around the board. Doors are opened and closed without sound, and the feet of the servants on the polished floor give no more sound than falling shadows. 4. The groups of angel guests are gathered like flowers upon the lawn where countless fountains play, and among them, moving here and there, are the forms of the loved ones who have passed away before him. His mother, his sister, and one still dearer than either, sing sweetly and walk among fragrant flowers more beautiful than his fancy ever painted. The last scene is the same as the first, except that it is a cold, chilly morning instead of a damp evening. Some reapers coming near see lying under the briers the poor old reaper with his upturned face, peaceful and quiet, now in death, but bearing the look of an answered prayer. THE RECOVERY OF THE HISPANIOLA[352-1] _By_ ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON The coracle--as I had ample reason to know before I was done with her--was a very safe boat for a person of my height and weight, both buoyant and clever in a seaway--but she was the most cross-grained lop-sided craft to manage. Do as you pleased, she always made more leeway than anything else, and turning round and round was the maneuver she was best at. She turned in every direction but the one I was bound to go; the most part of the time we were broadside on, and I am very sure I never should have made the ship at all but for the tide. By good fortune, paddle as I pleased, the tide was still sweeping me down; and there lay the _Hispaniola_ right in the fair way, hardly to be missed. First she loomed before me like a blot of something yet blacker than darkness, then her spars and hull began to take shape, and the next moment, as it seemed (for, the further I went, the brisker grew the current of the ebb), I was alongside of her hawser, and had laid hold. The hawser was as taut as a bowstring, and the current so strong she pulled upon her anchor. All round the hull, in the blackness, the rippling current bubbled and chattered like a little mountain stream. One cut with my sea-gully, and the _Hispaniola_ would go humming down the tide.