She and I, Volume 2: A Love Story. A Life History.Hutcheson, John C. (John Conroy)
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She and I, Volume 2: A Love Story. A Life History.
Hutcheson, John C. (John Conroy)
Love stories
Presently the current spins onward faster and more furiously. I see the
faint outlines of purple hills breaking the vacant curve of the horizon.
A delicious fragrance from tropic flowers fills the air--the perfumes
of the jessamine, the magnolia, the cereus. A sweet, delicious languor
creeps over me. I feel a vague sense of rest and happiness, which, to
my onlooking self, seems almost unaccountable; for, there am I, still
all alone on the ocean, swept onward towards the purple hills in the
distance, over the smooth-flowing surface of azure liquid, while, not a
sound is to be heard, save the restless murmuring of the many-voiced
sea.
The boat glides on.
Now I find myself encircled by radiant groups of picturesque coral
islands, all covered with palm-trees, whose waving branches are entwined
with varied-hued passion-flowers. Lilies and ferns, narcissi and
irises, are intermingled in one chaos of beauty, skirting the velvet
sward that runs down to the water's edge.
On each tiny islet, the lavish wealth of nature, freely outpoured,
seemed to make it a perfect paradise. Brilliantly-plumaged birds
flitted here and there, their colours contrasting with the green
foliage. Gauzy-winged insects buzzed to and fro. The notes of the
nightingale, or some kindred songster, could be heard, singing an
ecstatic soprano to the cooing bass of the dove and the rippling
obbligato of babbling brooks--that filtered through golden-yellow sands
into the lap of the mother of waters--amid the sympathetic harmony of
gushing cascades, whose noisy cadence was toned down by distance to a
melodious hum.
And now I find that I am alone no longer.
I see Min stepping forward to greet me, advancing down the sloping turf-
bank of the first island I reach; but, I cannot land. I cannot touch
her hand.
No. The current sweeps my boat onward, past each tiny paradise in turn;
and, on each, I still see Min always coming towards me, yet never
reaching me! Swiftly the boat glides, swiftly and more swift; until, at
last, Min, the palm-tree-shaded coral islets and all, are lost to
sight--gradually yet in a moment.
I now seem to be borne along on the tide of a tempestuous torrent,
through rocky defiles and beneath frowning precipices.
I am in the centre of a cyclone. The sickly lightning plays around me.
The thunder mutters--growls--rolls--peals forth--in grand ear-breaking
crashes, that appear to shake the dense sky overhead; but still,
whenever the electric coruscations light up the sable darkness, I can
see Min's face, apparently ever before me, ever inviting me on, ever
inapproachable!
Anon, the boat glides back into the ocean again. Soon after, I find
myself floating amongst an army of icebergs, all glittering with
distinct gradations of tint, from that of pale sea-green up to intense
blue. In front of me stretches a frozen field of hummocky ice, like
that I had seen in my first vision.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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