The white boat drifted on a blue and lustrous sea.  The reef points tapped a monotonous scale as the white sails swang to the swaying of the gaff.  Listlessly the boat drifted to the barely perceptible swell, regular as the breathings of a sleeping child.  Sound and motion invited to slumber.  The shining sea, the islands, green and purple, the soft sweet atmosphere, the full glory of a rare day, kept all the senses in tune.

There, 4 miles away, lay the island, and close at hand the turtle were ever and anon rising, balloon-like, from coral gardens to gulp greedy draughts of air, which not even the salty essences of the ocean could rob of its perfume.

Sometimes the boat did seem conscious of inconstancy, and anon with feminine frivolity she would coyly swing round to flirt with the islets close at hand.  She would have her own way until the free breezes came, and somehow the wind still blows whereso’er it listeth, and will not be untimely wooed, though the sailor whistles with all the “lascivious pleasing of the lute.”

Some atmospheric phenomenon, altogether beyond idle concern, lifted the islands afar off out of the water, suspending them in the sky.  The languorous breadths of the sea gradually changed to silver, and under the purple islands the silver band extended, bright and gleaming, until it seemed to merge again into the blue of the sky.  That was so, for was it not all visible—­the purple islands, with the silver bands separating them from the sea.  Yet under ordinary conditions those very islands are blue studs set in the rim of the ocean.  What magic is it that uplifts them to-day between the ocean and the sky?

This was a day of gushing sunshine and myriads of butterflies.  They flew from the mainland, not as spies but in battalions—­a never-ending procession miles broad.  You could fancy you heard in the throbbing stillness the movement of the fairy-like wings—­a faint, unending hum.  From the odorous jungle they came, flitting in gay inconsequence, steering a course of “slanting indeterminates,” yet full of the power and the passion of the moment.  They flitted between the idle boom and the deck, and up the gleaming sky in all the sizes that distance grades between nearness and infinity.

There were Islands near at hand and some afar off.  What instinct guided them—­for butterflies are short-sighted creatures—­I know not.  If wind had come, as we who lolled lazily in the boat longed, the myriad host of resplendent creatures would have been scattered and millions beaten down into the sea, above which they flew with such airy levity.

What instinct guided the frail, unreflective creatures across miles of ocean to the Islands of the Blest among butterflies.