One day a little cloud dawned upon our horizon.  It was at first pale and pearly, then pink like the hollow of a sea-shell, then misty blue,—­a darker blue, a deep blue dissolving into green, and the green outlining itself in emerald, with many a shade of lighter or darker green fretting its surface, throwing cliff and crest into high relief, and hinting at misty and mysterious vales, as fair as fathomless.  It floated up like a cloud from the nether world, and was at first without form and void, even as its fellows were; but as we drew nearer—­for we were steaming toward it across a sea of sapphire,—­it brooded upon the face of the water, while the clouds that had hung about it were scattered and wafted away.

Thus was an island born to us of sea and sky,—­an island whose peak was sky-kissed, whose vales were overshadowed by festoons of vapor, whose heights were tipped with sunshine, and along whose shore the sea sang softly, and the creaming breakers wreathed themselves, flashed like snow-drifts, vanished and flashed again.  The sea danced and sparkled; the air quivered with vibrant light.  Along the border of that island the palm-trees towered and reeled, and all its gardens breathed perfume such as I had never known or dreamed of.

For a few hours only we basked in its beauty, rejoiced in it, gloried in it; and then we passed it by.  Even as it had risen from the sea it returned into its bosom and was seen no more.  Twilight stole in between us, and the night blotted it out forever.  Forever?

I wonder what island it was?  A pearl of the Antilles, surely; but its name and fame, its history and mystery are lost to me.  Its memory lives and is as green as ever.  No wintry blasts visit it; even the rich dyes of autumn do not discolor it.  It is perennial in its rare beauty, unfading, unforgotten, unforgettable; a thing immutable, immemorial—­I had almost said immortal.

Whence it came and whither it has gone I know not.  It had its rising and its setting; its day from dawn to dusk was perfect.  Doubtless there are those whose lives have been passed within its tranquil shade:  from generation to generation it has known all that they have known of joy or sorrow.  All the world that they have knowledge of has been compassed by the far blue rim of the horizon.  That sky-piercing peak was ever the centre of their universe, and the wandering sea-bird has outflown their thoughts.

All this came to me as a child, when the first island “swam into my ken.”  It was a great discovery—­a revelation.  Of it were born all the islands that have been so much to me in later life.  And even then I seemed to comprehend the singular life that all islanders are forced to live:  the independence of that life—­for a man’s island is his fortress, girded about with the fathomless moat of the sea; and the dependence of it—­for what is that island but an atom dotting watery space and so easily cut off from communication with the world at large?  Drought may visit the islander, and he may be starved; the tornado may desolate his shore; fever and famine and thirst may lie in wait for him; sickness and sorrow and death abide with him.  Thus is he dependent in his independence.