Page:Fantastics and other Fancies.djvu/207

 shadowy port where much ghostly freight is discharged from vessels that never return? He haunts us sometimes,—even as he must have been haunted by the ghosts of dead years.

When some great white boat came in, uttering its long, wild cry of joy after its giant race of eighteen hundred miles, to be reechoed by the hundred voices of the rolling hills,—surely the old man must have dreamed upon his folding stool of marvelous nights upon the Mississippi,—nights filled with the perfume of orange blossoms under a milky palpitation of stars in amethystine sky, and witchery of tropical moonlight.

The romance of river-life is not like the romance of the sea,—that romance memory evokes for us in the midst of the city by the simple exhalations of an asphalt pavement under the sun,—divine saltiness, celestial freshness, the wild joy of wind-kissed waves, the hum of rigging and crackling of cordage, the rocking as of a mighty cradle. But it is perhaps sweeter. There is no perceptible motion of the river vessel; it is like the movement of a balloon, so steady that not we but the world only seems to move. Under the stars