When the planter had fairly finished his tale, it was a little while before I could teach my eyes to see the things about me in their places.  The slow-going sail, outside, I at first saw as the schooner that brought away the lost man from the Ice; the green of the earth would not, at first, show itself through the white with which the fancy covered it; and at first I could not quite feel that the ground was fast under my feet.  I even mistook one of my own men (the sight of whom was to warn me that I was wanted elsewhere) for one of the crew of the schooner Sparrow of a generation ago.

I got the tale and its scene gathered away, presently, inside my mind, and shook myself into a present association with surrounding things, and took my leave.  I went away the more gratified that I had a chance of lifting my cap to a matron, dark-haired and comely (who, I was sure, at a glance, had once been the maiden of Benjie Westham’s “troth-plight"), and receiving a handsome courtesy in return.

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THE INVISIBLE PRINCESS.

BY FRANCIS O’CONNOR.

I could be “as tedious as a king,” in analyzing those chivalrous instincts of masculine youth that lured me from college at nineteen, and away over the watery deserts of the sea; and, like Dogberry, “I could find in my heart to bestow it all of your worships.”  But since, like the auditor of that worthy, you do not want it, I will pass over the embarkation, which was tedious, over the sea-sickness, which was more tedious, over the home-sickness, over the monotonous duties assigned me, and the unvarying prospect of sea and sky, all so tedious that I grew as morose after a time as a travelling Englishman.  Neither was coasting, with restricted liberty and much toil, amongst people whose language I could not speak, quite all that my fancy painted it,—­although Genoa, Venice, the Bay of Naples,—­crimsoned by Vesuvius, and canopied by an Italian sky,—­and the storied scenes of Greece, all rich in beauties and historic associations, repaid many discomforts at the time and remain to me forever as treasures of memory the more precious for being dearly bought.  But these, with the pleasures and displeasures of Constantinople,—­the limit of our voyage,—­I will pass over, to the midsummer eve when, with all the arrangements for our return voyage completed, we swung slowly out of the northern eddy of the Golden Horn into the clear blue Bosphorus.

Already the lengthening shadows of a thousand domes and minarets stretched across its waters, and glimpses of sunlight lay between them, like golden clasps linking continent to continent.  Around us were ships and sailors from all parts of the habitable globe; while through shine and shadow flitted boats and caiques innumerable, and except where these, or the rising of a porpoise, or the dipping of a gull, broke the surface of the water, it lay as smooth as a mirror, reflecting its palace-guarded shores.