over it; graceful white cottages festooned with vines, with curving chalet or Chinese roofs colored red; pinnacled arbors and shadowy retreats of espaliers pretty as a coral grove; and a fair shining hotel in the midst, with arcades and porches and galleries—­the very dream of ease and luxury, as delicate and trim as if made of cut paper in many forms of prettiness.  Here was the nabob’s retreat; in this balmy garden of delight all that luxury, art and voluptuous desire could hint or hope for was collected; and nothing harsh or poor or rugged jarred the fullness of its luxurious ease.

Ten nights before its fragrant atmosphere was broken into beautiful ripples by the clang and harmony of dancing music.  It was the night of the “hop.”  The hotel was crowded.  Yachts and pleasure-vessels pretty as the petals of a flower tossed on the water, or as graceful shells banked the shores; and the steamer at twilight came breathing short, excited breaths with the last relay, for it was the height of the summer season.  In their light, airy dresses, as the music swam and sung, bright-eyed girls floated in graceful waltzes down the voluptuous waves of sound, and the gleam of light and color was like a butterflies’ ball.  The queenly, luscious night sank deeper, and lovers strolled in lamp-lighted arcades, and dreamed and hoped of life like that, the fairy existence of love and peace; and so till, tired of play, sleep and rest came in the small hours.

Hush!  All at once came the storm, not, as in northern latitudes, with premonitory murmur and fretting, lashing itself by slow degrees into white heat and rain, but the storm of the tropics, carrying the sea on its broad, angry shoulders, till, reaching the verdurous, love-clustered little isle, it flung the bulk of waters with all its huge, brawny force right upon the cut-paper prettinesses, and broke them into sand and splinters.  Of all those pretty children with blue and with opalescent eyes, arrayed like flowers of the field; of all those lovers dreaming of love in summer dalliance, and of cottages among figs and olives; of all the vigorous manhood and ripe womanhood, with all the skill and courage of successful life in them,—­not a tithe was saved.  The ghastly maw of the waters covered them and swallowed them.  A few sprang, among crashing timbers, on a floor laden with impetuous water—­the many perhaps never waked at all, or woke to but one short prayer.  The few who were saved hardly knew how they were saved—­the many who died never knew how they were slain or drowned.

It has twice been my fortune in life to see such a storm, and to know its sudden destruction:  once, to see a low, broad, shelving farm-house disappear to the ground timbers before my eyes, as if its substance had vanished into air, while great globes of electric fire burst down and sunk into the ground; once, to see a pine forest of centuries’ growth cut down as grass by the mower’s scythe.  I do not think it possible to see a third and survive, and I do not wish my soul to be whirled away in the vortex of such a storm.