Page:Fantastics and other Fancies.djvu/139

. And here were flowers blooming in the midst of sand!—the desert blossoming!—love living in the midst of death! And I saw the print of a hand, a child's hand,—the tiny fingers that had made this poor little garden and smoothed the sand over the roots of the flowers.

"There is no name upon the tomb," said the voice of the friend who stood beside me; "yet why should there be?"

Why, indeed? I answered. Why should the world know the sweet secret of that child's love? Why should unsympathetic eyes read the legend of that grief? Is it not enough that those who loved the dead man know his place of rest, and come hither to whisper to him in his dreamless sleep?

I said he; for somehow or other the sight of that little garden created a strange fancy in my mind, a fancy concerning the dead. The shells and the sand were not the same as those usually used in the cemeteries. They had been brought from a great distance—from the moaning shores of the Mexican Gulf.

So that visions of a phantom sea arose before me; and mystic ships rocking in their agony upon shadowy waves;—and dreams of wild