come over the waters to me from other worlds, in houses that can live on
the deep, and walk so swiftly, with their legs plunged in the water.
Where do you come from?--you are not so bright as the stars that live in
the blue sea above me, nor so deformed as those that toss in the darker
sea at my feet. Where did you grow, and how came you here?--there is not
a canoe on the sand; and though the shells bear the fish that live in
them so lightly over the waters, they never would bear me. When I placed
my foot on their scolloped edge of crimson and purple, they sunk into
the sand.”--“Beautiful creature,” said the stranger, “I come from a
world where there are thousands like me.”--“That is impossible,” said
Immalee, “for I live here alone, and other worlds must be like
this.”--“What I tell you is true, however,” said the stranger. Immalee
paused for a moment, as if making the first effort of reflection--an
exertion painful enough to a being whose existence was composed of
felicitous tacts and unreflecting instincts--and then exclaimed, “We
both must have grown in the world of voices, for I know what you say
better than the chirp of the loxia, or the cry of the peacock. That must
be a delightful world where they all speak--what would I give that my
roses grew in the world of answers!”
“At this moment the stranger made certain signals of hunger, which
Immalee understood in a moment, and told him to follow her to where the
tamarind and the fig were shedding their fruit--where the stream was so
clear, you could count the purple shells in its bed--and where she would
scoop for him in the cocoa-shell the cool waters that flowed beneath the
shade of the mango. As they went, she gave him all the information about
herself that she could. She told him that she was the daughter of a
palm-tree, under whose shade she had been first conscious of existence,
but that her poor father had been long withered and dead--that she was
very old, having seen many roses decay on their stalks; and though they
were succeeded by others, she did not love them so well as the first,
which were a great deal larger and brighter--that, in fact, every thing
had grown smaller latterly, for she was now able to reach to the fruit
which formerly she was compelled to wait for till it dropt on the
ground;--but that the water was grown taller, for once she was forced to
drink it on her hands and knees, and now she could scoop it in a
cocoa-shell. Finally, she added, she was much older than the moon, for
she had seen it waste away till it was dimmer than the light of a
fire-fly; and the moon that was lighting them now would decline too, and
its successor be so small, that she would never again give it the name
she had given to the first--Sun of the Night. “But,” said her companion,
“how are you able to speak a language you never learned from your loxias
and peacocks?”--“I will tell you,” said Immalee, with an air of
solemnity, which her beauty and innocence made at once ludicrous and
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