Argosy, Vol. 118, No. 4 — page 31: what you’re looking at

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

he | _ittle b/ Charles O she built one. If the ghost of Jim Daly, the smug- gler, had come back to the attic ‘above the little shop in the French quarter, where he died so suddenly, it would never have believed. that such a mount of magic could arise from the evil spoils that he had hid- den. Nor Eddie Bright, exiled to his lonely wireless station in the Caribbean, after giv- ing up the mystery of his dishonored name; nor the other girl who waited so long for him to come back. These had all seen hills in their time, but never the loveliness in them that Carlotta dreamed after she had listened, of mornings, to the tales of old Peretti, the sailorman. What a wonderful fellow, this Peretti, with his knotty old cane cut on the beach of some cannibal isle, and his grimy pieces of cardboard on which, with colored chalk, he would draw stiff and noble mountains like the corners of boxes; and then would sigh to the staring children of the plaza, and say he’d Ifave to give up—he just couldn’t draw mountains so they’d under- stand what mountains were! | But the seas he had sailed, the lands he had seen! Dusks and dawns on mountain tops peering above tropic waters! At first, just a glint of snow sparkling in the sun- rise; and then, as one’s good ship drew nearer, the purple gorges and green slopes spreading down to plains and rivers by the 501 iiets Tenney irl Who oppessee as Jackson ocean. Hills were the noble things of. earth; the winds swept them and the rains fell to make the lands like gardens, and their beauty lifted up the souls of men. The old sailor, hobbling to the plaza each day, told Carlotta of them and showed his rusty sketches, thumb-marked and smelling of tobacco and the mustiness of fo’c’s’le chests; and the little girl who never saw a hill tried to think of what could arise so gloriously above the flat town and the lowlands that she knew. Higher than the roof, higher than St. Louis’s cathedral spire, higher than any- thing one could believe! From the galleries above the longshoreman’s lodgings she could see the mighty Mississippi flowing so mysteriously out of. the north toward the dim blue line of the Louisiana cypress for- ests, and a summer cloud hanging there above the hidden Gulf made her think of the wonders which Peretti tried to de- scribe. | And so, on the first evening when Car- lotta and T’ Frere discovered the hole in the brick wall from the attic above their lodgings to the attic of the house next door, and had come into the room of won- ders, she dropped an armful of the lovely stuff they had found there and stood staring at it. The are light shone through the grimed windows and touched a little peak with faint shimmerings. EO DOO SJ (C(O)