"As I sat there heedless of time, the light in the west faded, and the great blue dome blushed with a thousand delicate gradations of color, from the deep sapphire overhead, where the first stars twinkled, through fainter blues and apple greens, until everything melted into the gold of the horizon." "So he went off, leaving me alone in the white glory of the tropic night. No words of mine can convey the magic of that moonlight, enveloping everything, and culminating in a glittering path across the water. Every now and then a fish jumped, and I could see its wet sides glitter; or a ghostly gull swept by on silent wings, for when the full moon rides in the southern sky, not even the birds can sleep, but wake and sing their songs fitfully throughout the night." "They sat at the window waiting, and watching the heat-lightning play in the west and the reflection of the ships' lamps that lay in the water like long yellow smudges. As the night closed in the threatened storm swept up out of the sea, deluging the city and whipping the quiet harbor into a foam; the thunder crashed incessantly, and the flashes of lightning showed stooping figures running along the bund to shelter, and hooded jinrikishas tearing by, the coolies' grass cloaks dripping at every blade." "When one woman wishes to wound another she always strikes at her heart." "Black was very inky and white immaculate to this son of the prairies." "People never relish life as they do when the taste of death is still bitter between their teeth." "Her heart was as pure as crystal." "Women are the most conservative things alive." "The face he turned upon me was no more the face of Minerva's lover than the sea in December is like the sea in June." "I venture to say that very few of the dead would be entirely welcome if they returned unexpectedly to their widowed affinities." "Nothing is so perfect a guarantee of respectability in a chance acquaintance as the names of your own friends on his visiting-list." "Many babies and Burmese summers had exhausted all the elasticity she had ever possessed." On the whole, 'A Romance of Summer Seas,' while it is on a less ambitious scale than 'The Veiled Doctor,' seems more natural and shows a gratifying advance along several lines. When Miss Davis was suffering intensely in her last illness, she would pat her mother's hand and say, "We shall have our carriage when my book sells." But her unselfish dreams were not to be realized. The career which seemed so full of promise was cut short by death. Now we see through a glass darkly; when we see face to face, we shall know why this life of usefulness ended in its morning. As long as the memories of the 'lost cause' linger in her beloved Southland, so long shall the name of Winnie Davis, 'The Daughter of the Confederacy,' remain unforgotten. She has passed away, but the perfume of her noble life will not pass away. FOOTNOTES: