have so often dreamed and romanced, the miner with
uplifted pick, the camp, the burdened mule laboring
up the steep ascent; forms of cascades of tumbling-
waters, illusive lakes reflecting on their limpid surface
the inverted trees and mountains ; of alligators, leagues
long, with head and feet and outstretched tail; of
elephants, hydras, sea-serpents, sphinxes, forms of
anything and everything the heart can feel or the
imagination pencil.
Like a gem embankment, meanwhile, the sky-wall glows in crimson beneath a brilliant arch of orange, and the frothy clouds toss themselves, and revel in their aerial sea of colors. Golden threads are spun and woven into a metallic web overlaying the deep vermilion sky, which beams through the interspaces, while from behind an opaque cloud broad diverging streams of transparent light are thrown over the scene like the radii of an enormous fan ; then as the black obstruction melts to silver burnished by a flood of un- obstructed white, suddenly the fan leaves turn to auroral streaks, and from some seemingly Protean pyrotechnic works under the sea's bank rainbows radi- ate outward and upward. On either side of the cen- tral display, beginning at the water's edge, deep crimson, through imperceptible transitions and grada- tions, turns to carmine, then to purple, and violet, and indigo, and finally into brown, while above and over all, northward and southward, over sea and clouds and sky, hangs a gauzy veil, in many several blending shades of softest tinted lilac.
At last, resting for a moment on the ocean's brink, with a plunge the sun goes down; and as the long, golden streamers reluctantly follow, and while the western sky yet glows as from hidden furnace fires, from the gray east, silently and unobserved, the moon creeps up, coquetting with the clouds, and seemingly bashful of her more tender light, and fearful of ob- truding her soft, silvery presence upon the more bril- liant eflbrts of her consort, throws a smile of quiet
