The Argosy — page 341: what you’re looking at

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

322 Letters from Majorca. though I don’t know that the tarantula is an inhabitant of Mallorca, still I believe there are writhing snakes and slimy lizards. No; our lines have fallen in pleasant places. Day by day, since our return from Soller, the sun has risen in all its splendour, gilding the town, flashing the blue waters. Day by day we have had an intensely blue and cloudless sky. You in England have been shivering with cold, we have revelled in the warmth of this sunny South. I cannot tell you how it delights me. It gilds the imagination ; the blood seems to flow freely through the veins. There is no stagnation. Here I would live and move and have my being ; here, or elsewhere in these glowing, golden, flashing, sapphire latitudes, where, as it were, you seem to live in a rainbow and to walk on ether. It is our last night here—and such a glorious night. -I have told you of these nights over and over again, but I cannot bring them too vividly before you. ‘The deep, dark dome and the flashing stars and the travelling constellations, all large. and brilliant as England knows and sees them not. We have just been for a walk on the ramparts, and grander than ever—perhaps because it was our farewell look—seemed the cathedral in its sable outlines. It was nearly midnight, and we walked our last night-walk through the street of the town. Nothing disturbed the intense quiet. A screech owl passed through the air ; and here and there one heard the monotonous call of an imprisoned quail : but these sounds alone broke the stillness ; these, and the far- off call and the heavy tread of a watchman, with the uncertain flash of his lantern. One is passing as I write, and // Sereno tells us that the night is serene. Oh, watchman, what of the night—that night we must all encounter? and what of the morning,and where? No, no, you can- not answer these. You cannot answer me any of the mysteries of life. Bear with me, my sister, for a moment if my pen wanders and melancholy marks me for her own. I have told you it is our last night in Palma. It is the break of our present existence. It is the end of a strangely happy time in a life that was not born to happi- ness; that began, soothsayers have said, under the influence of the House of Saturn. I tremble to-night. Is this a prelude to some awful change, some dire calamity, that shall turn what little sweet remains to the blackness of night, the bitterness of death? I know not; but there is that sense upon me which has come to me now and then, swift, sure, ominous, indescribable: a prophet of evil: a harbinger of woe. I will hasten away ; but for me to-night there will be no oblivion, no sinking into unconsciousness, no wandering in dreamland. I shall see the sun rise and the day dawn that heralds our departure from this land of the pointed cypress and the spreading palm. It has come. ‘The sun rose in all its glory. Not a cloud broke ECORNIELIOOKS. Com