mountain torrent. Idler fancies crept over them as soon as they got well out of the last adobe lane of the gray and glowing town, and they fell into a soberer pace. It was another stretch over the same wide, bayoneted plain, which looked as if myriads of soldiers in Lincoln green were standing firmly at their arms over the wide prairie, or as if Birnam Wood was getting ready to march on Dunsinane. It was a superb army, and suggested the prettiest of uniforms for a soldier's gala-day, if not for actual service.
The level drive brought us, ere fall of night, to this dingy dwelling-place of Ceral. I stroll in its dull plaza, and buy poor oranges and poorer bananas. The Hot Lands are leaving us. A mosquito buzzes about my ear, the first I had heard or seen in all the country. He seemed so lonely that it appeared a deed of charity to put him into the ghostly company, innumerable of his kindred, that the hand of man has slain.
An imaginative metaphysician said once, in a sermon "On Compensation," "The little insect you crush between your thumb and finger sails away on silvery wings to a loftier Empyrean;" and an irreverent listener commented, "Every time, then, you kill a mosquito you sting an angel." This was not of so high a faith as the little girl, who soliloquized to a fly, held between her thumb and finger, "Itty fy, you want to see Dod? You s'all see Dod;" and a crunching of her finger and thumb, and grinding of the fly between them, puts her promise, as far as she could do so, into effect. So far has this mosquito murder led us, and him, away from this dismal plaza.
Vespers were being held in a little church, and a melodeon, with a boy player and girl singers, gave this usually formal service a home-familiarity that was so far agreeable. May this attainment lead to higher graces of social worship.
The sun sinks behind the silver hills, changing them to amethyst and gold, and the dreary cell of Ceral is reluctantly re-entered. Dinner is as bad as the chambers; bed and board alike disgust. The meats are cooked horribly, and are of horrid materials. I follow Meg Merrilies's advice, "Gape, sinner, and swallow," and
