eath
of a new world--the fragrance of unknown flowers, and the dewy scent of
never-trodden fields drifted to my nostrils; and to my ears came a
sound of laughter scarcely more human than the murmur of the wind in
the trees, and a pretty undulating whisper as though a great concourse
of people were talking softly in their sleep. I gazed about scarcely
knowing how much of my senses or surroundings were real and how much
fanciful, until I presently became aware the rosy twilight was
broadening into day, and under the increasing shine a strange scene was
fashioning itself.

At first it was an opal sea I looked on of mist, shot along its upper
surface with the rosy gold and pinks of dawn. Then, as that soft,
translucent lake ebbed, jutting hills came through it, black and
crimson, and as they seemed to mount into the air other lower hills
showed through the veil with rounded forest knobs till at last the
brightening day dispelled the mist, and as the rosy-coloured gauzy
fragments went slowly floating away a wonderfully fair country lay at
my feet, with a broad sea glimmering in many arms and bays in the
distance beyond. It was all dim and unreal at first, the mountains
shadowy, the ocean unreal, the flowery fields between it and me vacant
and shadowy.

Yet were they vacant? As my eyes cleared and day brightened still
more, and I turned my head this way and that, it presently dawned upon
me all the meadow coppices and terraces northwards of where I lay, all
that blue and spacious ground I had thought to be bare and vacant, were
alive with a teeming city of booths and tents; now I came to look more
closely there was a whole town upon the slope, built as might be in a
night of boughs and branches still unwithered, the streets and ways of
that city in the shadows thronged with expectant people moving in
groups and shifting to and fro in lively streams--chatting at the
stalls and clustering round the tent doors in soft, gauzy,
parti-coloured crowds in a way both fascinating and perplexing.

I stared about me like a child at its first pantomime, dimly
understanding all I saw was novel, but more allured to the colour and
life of the picture than concerned with its exact meaning; and while I
stared and turned my finger was bandaged, and my new friend had been
lisping away to me without getting anything in turn but a shake of the
head. This made him thoughtful, and thereon followed a curious incident
which I cannot explain.