The crops raised upon the rich alluvium of these islands were enormous, and if the other difficulties attending cultivation in such a region could be surmounted, there seemed to be no doubt of our friend the babou's success in his venture. But it was a wild and lonesome region, and as we floated along, after leaving the island, up a canal which flamed in the sunset like a great illuminated baldric slanting across the enormous shoulder of the world, a little air came breathing over me as if it had just blown from the mysterious regions where space and time are not, or are in different forms from those we know. A sense of the crudity of these great expanses of sea-becoming-land took possession of me; the horizon stretched away like a mere endless continuation of marshes and streams; the face of my companion was turned off sea-ward with an expression of ineffably mellow tranquillity; a glamour came about as if the world were again formless and void, and as if the marshes were chaos. I shivered with a certain eager expectation of beholding the shadowy outline of a great and beautiful spirit moving over the face of the waters to create a new world. I drew my gaze with difficulty from the heavens and turned toward my companion. He was gone. The sailors also had disappeared. And there, as I sat in that open boat, midst of the Sunderbunds, at my domestic antipodes, happened to me the most wondrous transformation which the tricksy stage-carpenters and scene-shifters of the brain have ever devised. For this same far-stretching horizon, which had just been alluring my soul into the depths of the creative period, suddenly contracted itself four-square into the somewhat yellowed walls of a certain apartment which I need not now further designate, and the sun and his flaming clouds became no more nor less than a certain half dozen of commonplace pictures upon these same yellowish walls; and the boat wherefrom I was about to view the birth of continents degraded itself into a certain--or, I had more accurately said, a very uncertain--cane chair, wherein I sit writing these lines and mourning for my lost Bhima Gandharva. THE COLLEGE STUDENT.