The Argosy — page 330: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

Letters from Majorca. 311 expectations would leave me out of his will altogether. I was quite right. Since then I have firmly believed in presentiments ; that is, in my own; I have not much faith in other people’s. We were concerned at the absence of the barouche ; and when one o'clock vibrated upon the air, we grew alarmed. We were anxious to get back to Palma. It was necessary that we should do so, if our plans were not to be altogether set aside. Moreover, if it did not turn up to-day, why should it do so to-morrow ? and so on, ad infinitum. There was no telegraph to Palma—another sign of the sleepiness and inactivity of the little island of Mallorca. ‘These were our last days in the island, and we wanted to spend them specially in Palma. There was so much in the town we still wanted to do and see and sketch and photograph. We also wanted to become more intimate with it than we were: to have it well enshrined in our minds and memo- ries: to grow familiar with it: a familiarity that should breed, not contempt, but love. In truth it is very easy to fall in love with Palma : it is a fair setting to its fair women. You have heard of the latter, and know how they have affected H. C.’s peace of mind. He has all the susceptibility of the poetic temperament. I don’t meana mere ordinary poet, which is as common as the fishes of the sea, but a genius of the highest order: who might have headed the list of immortals, if Shakespeare had not lived before him. As I have said, we grew alarmed when one o’clock boomed forth, and the moments flew by, and still no signs of a barouche, not even any symptom of dust on the distant road, such as poor Sister Anne saw from her tower when watching for a deliverer for Bluebeard’s wife. There is so much unconscious pathos and despair in that one bit of the story. ‘‘ Sister Anne, Sister Anne, do you see anybody coming ?” * Alas, Sister, I see only the dust from a flock of sheep.” : Matters, too, were growing critical between H.C. and A. The latter,on descending at twelve o’clock, had assumed the brow of Erebus, on finding H. C. in suspiciously close contact with Rosita. The truth is she was sewing a button on to his collar, as he had lost his stud ; but A. couldn’t see that. I must say it served him night for creeping down in slippers to surprise the enemy. Yet I sympathise with him; H.C. is, after all, an interloper. A. seemed to think that H. C. had somehow stolen a march upon him, by being up three or four hours in the day earlier than himself. He was not aware that we had spent most of the time in patrolling about Soller, taking sketches and photos,and dreaming delicious day dreams born of this quaint old town. _ The old lady was just then ready to be photographed, and, to divert his attention from the industrious Rosita and the Elysianed (why not coin an adjective?) H.C., I proposed that he should offer her his arm up the road to the romantic vine-leaved, pantiled bower: our scene of action. Upon which I thought he would have taken me up bodily and hurled me into the midst of that horrible, grinding, rolling machine, where I should have been smothered with chocolate, and soon have AGO Goo <S (S©)