Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/824



that of an ice-boat is the speed of their sliding passage.

Their mystery shall enhance at times the breadth and perspective of this open land; their prankishness reveal, at sunlit moments, a league-distant spire, a warm pyramidal gable, notes of brilliancy enfolded in swathing violet.

When the canny juggler of the lower sky sends up ball after ball of dun-colored cloud, and plays with them over the sky in cross-current and freaky gust, their dainty planes of moving shadow run swiftly underneath, like a second game which must be carried on in dexterous mimicry. Fades the tiny ball into air itself—whist! its double is tangled in reeds, lost in the pool. Or if the magician deftly pat and model his unreluctant little cloud until it flush into an airy face, mocking, dissolving, laughing, or melting into a sort of skyey marriage with some other hastening neighbor who dances forward, hand outstretched, their faithful earthy similitudes of air-spun dark prove quick in sympathetic change.

Sometimes these little Ariels are bearing messages across this world of blowing grass to the unguessed folk inhabiting its cool recesses. Again, they dash towards you with gifts and surprises from that horizon and lay them all at the threshold of your happy mind.

And, as nearing sun and drumlin become at last confounded, one long emissary after another flits out from pasture edge across the leagues of marsh to hale back his fellow. But they all flit together and fleet away into a horizon of disguise. A blur of mystery follows their rustling, and only a cricket closes the curtain.