Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/404

 through this window—the shining rocks, with the sea leaping above them in the sum I wondered what more I could ask for to delight my eye. Kána-Aná was still aslep [sic], but he never let loose his hold on me, as though he feared his pale-faced friend would fade away from him. He lay close beside me. His sleek, figure, supple and graceful in repose, was the embodiment of free, untrammeled youth … I dropped of into one of those delicious morning naps. I awoke, again presently; my companion-in-arms was the occasion, this time. He had awakened, stolen softly away, resumed his single garment—said garment, and all others, he considered superfluous after dark—and had prepared for me, with his own hands, a breakfast; which he now declared to me, in violent and suggestive pantomime, was all ready to be eaten …

"If it is a question how long a man can withstand the seductions of nature, and the consolations and conveniences of the state of nature, I had solved it in one case; for I was as natural as possible, in about three days."

The relation between Kána-Aná and the narrator ends in the death of the lad, after the latter has visited • America with his friend, and has returned to his island, but not to happiness; his young spirit out of poise by his experiences in civilization, miserable without his friend, and ever pining away, untill he is drowned in the sea—by accident or intention. The sketch ends:

In Italian fiction (notably a crudely physical sketch, of slight literary quality, by Giorgio Cattelani, entitled "Ermafrodito," in that writer's "Turpi Amori') are contributions to the topic that are more or less explicit. In Italian verse we have also the promptings of that