Project Gutenberg's The Vision of Elijah Berl, by Frank Lewis Nason

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Title: The Vision of Elijah Berl

Author: Frank Lewis Nason

Release Date: April 23, 2010 [EBook #32107]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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THE VISION OF ELIJAH BERL

By Frank Lewis Nason

Author of "To the End of the Trail," and "The Blue Goose"

Boston
Little, Brown, and Company
1905

_Copyright, 1905_,
BY LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY.

_All rights reserved._

Published April, 1905.

Printers
S. J. PARKHILL & CO., BOSTON, U. S. A.

PRELUDE

_Eight hundred and fifty miles of winding coast line bend in and out. So
far as the eye can reach over the wrinkling sheet of the Pacific, to
where its giant swells beat against bare, brown cliffs and break in
smothers of hissing foam, not a sail is seen, not a sign of life, save
flocks of white-winged gulls and sea-mews, or herds of barking seals
that swarm on rocky islets. Mountains spring from the sea and climb,
mount on mount, three miles into the air, or sloping sea-washed sands
stretch dry and barren and forbidding, to rise at length in verdure-clad
hills and snow-capped mountains. In the mountains are savage beasts and
more savage men. On the plains a few straggling herds of cattle, with
uncouth vaqueros, cluster around a seeping spring of bitter water. Here
and there white-washed adobe mission houses, all but hidden in a clamber
of vines and trees, mark a feeble stream that trickles from the distant
mountains. Olive-skinned signors and olive-skinned signoritas round out
the circle of their lives and there lie down and die, unknowing and
unknown; they and their fellows, undreamed of, the land of their abode a
hazy myth._

_As by the wave of a magic wand, all is changed. The ocean now is dotted
with sails from the uttermost parts of the earth. They choke