Short Stories and Essays | Page 8

sole reality.

I.
Everything here, indeed, is so strange that you placidly accept whatever
offers itself as the simplest and naturalest fact. Those low hills, that
climb, with their tough, dark cedars, from the summer sea to the
summer sky, might have drifted down across the Gulf Stream from the
coast of Maine; but when, upon closer inspection, you find them skirted
with palms and bananas, and hedged with oleanders, you merely
wonder that you had never noticed these growths in Maine before,
where you were so familiar with the cedars. The hotel itself, which has
brought the Green Mountains with it, in every detail, from the
dormer-windowed mansard-roof, and the white-painted,
green-shuttered walls, to the neat, school-mistressly waitresses in the
dining-room, has a clump of palmettos beside it, swaying and sighing
in the tropic breeze, and you know that when it migrates back to the
New England hill-country, at the end of the season, you shall find it
with the palmettos still before its veranda, and equally at home,
somewhere in the Vermont or New Hampshire July. There will be the
same American groups looking out over them, and rocking and
smoking, though, alas! not so many smoking as rocking.
But where, in that translation, would be the gold braided red or blue
jackets of the British army and navy which lend their lustre and color
here to the veranda groups? Where should one get the house walls of
whitewashed stone and the garden walls which everywhere glow in the
sun, and belt in little spaces full of roses and lilies? These things must
come from some other association, and in the case of him who here
confesses, the lustrous uniforms and the glowing walls rise from waters
as far away in time as in space, and a long-ago apparition of Venetian
Junes haunts the coral shore. (They are beginning to say the shore is not
coral; but no matter.) To be sure, the white roofs are not accounted for
in this visionary presence; and if one may not relate them to the
snowfalls of home winters, then one must frankly own them absolutely
tropical, together with the green-pillared and green-latticed galleries.
They at least suggest the tropical scenery of Prue and I as one
remembers seeing it through Titbottom's spectacles; and yet, if one
supplies roofs of brown-red tiles, it is all Venetian enough, with the
lagoon-like expanses that lend themselves to the fond effect. It is so

Venetian, indeed, that it wants but a few silent gondolas and noisy
gondoliers, in place of the dark, taciturn oarsmen of the clumsy native
boats, to complete the coming and going illusion; and there is no good
reason why the rough little isles that fill the bay should not call
themselves respectively San Giorgio and San Clemente, and Sant'
Elena and San Lazzaro: they probably have no other names!

II.
These summer isles of Eden have this advantage over the scriptural
Eden, that apparently it was not woman and her seed who were
expelled, when once she set foot here, but the serpent and his seed:
women now abound in the Summer Islands, and there is not a snake
anywhere to be found. There are some tortoises and a great many frogs
in their season, but no other reptiles. The frogs are fabled of a note so
deep and hoarse that its vibration almost springs the environing mines
of dynamite, though it has never yet done so; the tortoises grow to a
great size and a patriarchal age, and are fond of Boston brown bread
and baked beans, if their preferences may be judged from those of a
colossal specimen in the care of an American family living on the
islands. The observer who contributes this fact to science is able to
report the case of a parrot- fish, on the same premises, so exactly like a
large brown and purple cockatoo that, seeing such a cockatoo later on
dry land, it was with a sense of something like cruelty in its exile from
its native waters. The angel-fish he thinks not so much like angels; they
are of a transparent purity of substance, and a cherubic innocence of
expression, but they terminate in two tails, which somehow will not
lend themselves to the resemblance.
Certainly the angel-fish is not so well named as the parrot-fish; it might
better be called the ghostfish, it is so like a moonbeam in the pools it
haunts, and of such a convertible quality with the iridescent vegetable
growths about it. All things here are of a weird convertibility to the
alien perception, and the richest and rarest facts of nature lavish
themselves in humble association with the commonest and most
familiar. You drive through long stretches of wayside willows, and
realize only now and