Page:Fantastics and other Fancies.djvu/249

 from ivorine to glossy bronze, through half the shades of Broca's pattern-colors;—for there is a strange blending of tribes and peoples here. By and by, when the youths and maidens of these patriarchal families shall mate, they will build for themselves funny little timber-homes,—like those you see dotting the furzy-green plain about the log-dwelling of the oldest settler,—even as so many dove-cots. Existence here is so facile, happy, primitively simple, that trifles give joy unspeakable;—in that bright air whose purity defies the test of even the terrible solar microscope, neither misery nor malady may live. To such contented minds surely the Past must ever appear in a sunset-glow of gold; the Future in eternal dawn of rose;—until, perchance, the huge dim city summon some of them to her dusty servitude, when the gray elders shall have passed away, and the little patches of yellow-flowered meadow-land shall have changed hands, and the island hath no more place for all its children. . . . So they live and love, and marry and give in marriage, and build their little dove-cots, and pass away forever,—either to smoky cities of the South and West,