How divine the coming of the morning,--the coming of the Sun,--exorcising the shadowy terrors of the night with infinite restoration of color! I look upon the woods, and they are not the same: the palms have vanished; the cypresses have fled away; trees young and comely and brightly green replace them. A hand is laid upon my shoulder,--the hand of the gray Captain: 'Go forward, and see what you have never seen before.' Even as he speaks, our boat, turning sharply, steams out of the green water into--what can I call it?--a flood of fluid crystal,--a river of molten diamond,--a current of liquid light? 'It will be like this for eight miles,' observed the Captain. Eight miles!--eight miles of magic,--eight miles of glory! O the unspeakable beauty of it! It might be fifty feet in depth at times; yet every pebble, every vein of the water-grass blades, every atom of sparkling sand, is clearly visible as though viewed through sun-filled air; and but for the iridescent myriads of darting fish, the scintillations of jewel-color, we might well fancy our vessel floating low in air, like a balloon whose buoyancy is feeble. Water-grasses and slippery moss carpet much of the channel with a dark verdure that absorbs the light; the fish and the tortoises seem to avoid those sandy reaches left naked to the sun, as if fearful the great radiance would betray them, or as though unable to endure the force of the beams descending undimmed through all the translucent fathoms of the stream. It has no mystery this laughing torrent, save the mystery of its subterranean birth; it doffs all veils of shadow; the woods gradually withdraw from its banks; and the fires of the Southern sun affect not the delicious frigidity of its waves. Almost irresistible its fascination to the swimmer; one envies the fishes that shoot by like flashes of opal, even the reptiles that flee before the prow; a promise of strange joy? of electrical caress, seems to smile from those luminous deeps,--like the witchery of a Naiad, the blandishment of an Undine. And so we float at last into a great basin, dark with the darkness of profundities unfathomed by the sun;--the secret sources of the spring, the place of its mystic fountain-birth, and the end of our pilgrimage. Down, down, deep, there is a mighty quivering visible; but the surface remains unmoved; the giant gush expends its strength far beneath us. From what unilluminated caverns,--what subterranean lakes,--burst this prodigious flow? Go ask the gnomes! Man may never answer. This is the visible beginning indeed; but of the invisible beginning who may speak?--not even the eye of the Sun hath discerned it; the light of the universe hath never shone upon it.--Earth reveals much to the magicians of science; but the dim secret of her abysses she keeps forever. A TROPICAL INTERMEZZO