In the Footprints of the Padres | Page 4

despairing wail that was enough to pierce the hardest heart. I imagined my heart was about to break; and when we put out to sea in a damp and dreary drizzle, and the shore-line dissolved away, while on board there was overcrowding, and confusion worse confounded in evidence everywhere,--perhaps it did break, that overwrought heart of mine and has been a patched thing ever since.
We were a miserable lot that night, pitched to and fro and rolled from side to side as if we were so much baggage. And there was a special horror in the darkness, as well as in the wind that hissed through the rigging, and in the waves that rushed past us, sheeted with foam that faded ghostlike as we watched it,--faded ghostlike, leaving the blackness of darkness to enfold us and swallow us up.
Day after day for a dozen days we ploughed that restless sea. There were days into which the sun shone not; when everybody and everything was sticky with salty distillations; when half the passengers were sea-sick and the other half sick of the sea. The decks were slimy, the cabins stuffy and foul. The hours hung heavily, and the horizon line closed in about us a gray wall of mist.
Then I used to bury myself in my books and try to forget the world, now lost to sight, and, as I sometimes feared, never to be found again. I had brought my private library with me; it was complete in two volumes. There was "Rollo Crossing the Atlantic," by dear old Jacob Abbot; and this book of juvenile travel and adventure I read on the spot, as it were,--read it carefully, critically; flattering myself that I was a lad of experience, capable of detecting any nautical error which Jacob, one of the most prolific authors of his day, might perchance have made. The other volume was a pocket copy of "Robinson Crusoe," upon the fly-leaf of which was scrawled, in an untutored hand, "Charley from Freddy,"--this Freddy was my juvenile chum. I still have that little treasure, with its inscription undimmed by time.
Frequently I have thought that the reading of this charming book may have been the predominating influence in the development of my taste and temper; for it was while I was absorbed in the exquisitely pathetic story of Robinson Crusoe that the first island I ever saw dawned upon my enchanted vision. We had weathered Cape Sable and the Florida Keys. No sky was ever more marvellously blue than the sea beneath us. The density and the darkness that prevail in Northern waters had gone out of it; the sun gilded it, the moon silvered it, and the great stars dropped their pearl-plummets into it in the vain search for soundings.
Sea gardens were there,--floating gardens adrift in the tropic gale; pale green gardens of berry and leaf and long meandering vine, rocking upon the waves that lapped the shores of the Antilles, feeding the current of the warm Gulf Stream; and, forsooth, some of them to find their way at last into the mazes of that mysterious, mighty, menacing sargasso sea. Strange sea-monsters, more beautiful than monstrous, sported in the foam about our prow, and at intervals dashed it with color like animated rainbows. From wave to wave the flying fish skimmed like winged arrows of silver. Sometimes a land-bird was blown across the sky--the sea-birds we had always with us,--and ever the air was spicy and the breeze like a breath of balm.
One day a little cloud dawned upon our horizon. It was at first pale and pearly, then pink like the hollow of a sea-shell, then misty blue,--a darker blue, a deep blue dissolving into green, and the green outlining itself in emerald, with many a shade of lighter or darker green fretting its surface, throwing cliff and crest into high relief, and hinting at misty and mysterious vales, as fair as fathomless. It floated up like a cloud from the nether world, and was at first without form and void, even as its fellows were; but as we drew nearer--for we were steaming toward it across a sea of sapphire,--it brooded upon the face of the water, while the clouds that had hung about it were scattered and wafted away.
Thus was an island born to us of sea and sky,--an island whose peak was sky-kissed, whose vales were overshadowed by festoons of vapor, whose heights were tipped with sunshine, and along whose shore the sea sang softly, and the creaming breakers wreathed themselves, flashed like snow-drifts, vanished and flashed again. The sea danced and sparkled; the air quivered with vibrant light. Along the border of that island the palm-trees towered and reeled, and all its gardens breathed perfume such as I had never known or dreamed of.
For