Avon Fantasy Reader No. 14 — page 114: what you’re looking at

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

past six, for I had promised O’Brien, captain of the U. S. Marines, to go out with him to the rifle range at La Grande Princesse that morning and look over the butts with him. [ like O'Brien, and I am not uninterested in the efficiency of Uncle Sam’s Marines, but my chief objective was to watch the pelicans. Out there on the glorious beach of Estate Grande Princesse (“Big Princess” as the Black People call it), a colony of pelicans make their home, and it is a never- ending source of amusement to me to watch them fish. A Caribbean pelican is probably the most graceful flier we have in these latitudes,—barring not even the hurricane bird, that describer of noble arcs and parabolas,—and the most insanely, absurdly awkward creature on land that Providence has cared in a light-hearted moment to create! T expressed my interest in Captain O’Brien’s latest improvements, and while he was talking shop to one of his lieutenants and half a dozen enlisted men he has camped out there, [ slipped down to the beach to watch the pelicans fish. ‘Vhree or four of them were describing curves and turns of indescribable complexity and perfect grace over the green water of the reef-enclosed white beach. Ever and again one would stop short in the air, fold himself up like a jackknife, turn head downward, his great pouched bill extended like the head of a cruel spear, and drop like a plummet into the water, emerging an instant later with the pouch distended with a fish. I stayed a trifle too long,—for my eyes. Driving back I observed that I had picked up several sun-spots, and when I arrived home I polished a set of yel- lowish sun-spectacles I keep for such emergencies and put them on. The east side of the house had been shaded against the pouring morning sunlight, and in this double shade I looked to see my eyes clear up. The sun- spots persisted, however, in that annoying, recurrent way they have,—almost disappearing and then returning in undiminished kaleidoscopic grotesque- ness,—those strange blocks and parcels of pure color changing as one winks from indigo to brown and from brown to orange and then to a blinding turquoise-blue, according to some eery natural law of physics, within the fluids of the eye itself. The sun-spots were so persistent that morning that I decided to keep my eyes closed for some considerable time and see if that would allow them to run their course and wear themselves out. Blue and mauve grotesques of the vague, general shape of diving pelicans swam and jumped inside my eyes, It was very annoying. | called to Albertina. “Albertina,” said I, when she had come to the door, “‘please go into my bedroom and close all the jalousies tight. Keep out all the light you can, please.” “Ahl roight, sir,” replied the obedient Albertina, and I heard her slapping the jalousie-blinds together with sharp little clicks. “De jalousie abl close, sir,” reported Albertina. I thanked her, and proceeded with half-shut eyes into the bedroom, which, not yet invaded with afternoon’s sunlight and closely shuttered, offered an appearance of deep twilight. I lay, face down, across the bed, a pillow under my face, and my eyes buried in darkness. Very gradually, the diving pelican faded out, to a cube, to a dim, recurrent 112 comicbooks.com