An Earthly Paradise.

        “Oh that the desert were my dwelling-place,

            With one fair spirit for my monitor!

        That I might all forget the human race,

            And, hating no one, love but only her.

        Ye elements, in whose ennobling stir

            I feel myself exalted, can ye not

        Accord me such a being? Do I err

            In deeming such inhabit many a spot—

    Though with them to converse can rarely be our lot.”

Oft during his sojourn in the sequestered valley do these lines occur to the young prairie merchant. And vividly; for, in very truth, he has realised the aspiration of the poet.

But, though dwelling in a desert, far different is the scene habitually before his eyes. From the front of the humble chalet that has so opportunely afforded him a shelter, seated under the spreading branches of a pecan-tree, he can look on a landscape lovely as ever opened to the eyes of man—almost as that closed against our first parents when expelled from Paradise. Above he beholds a sapphire sky, scarce ever shadowed by a cloud; a sun whose fierce, fervid beams become softened as they fall amid the foliage of evergreen oaks; among clustering groves that show all the varied tints of verdure, disporting upon green glassy glades, and glinting into arbours overshadowed by the sassafras laurel, the Osage orange, and the wild China-tree, laced together by a trellis of grape vines. A lake in the centre of this luxurious vegetation, placid as sleep itself, only stirred by the webbed feet of waterfowl, or the wings of dipping swallows, with above and below a brawling rivulet, here and there showing cascades like the tails of white horses, or the skirts of ballroom belles floating through waltz or gallopade.

In correspondence with these fair sights are the sounds heard. By day the cooing of doves, the soft tones of the golden oriole, and the lively chatter of the red cardinal; by night the booming note of the bull-bat, the sonorous call of the trumpeter swan, and that lay far excelling all—the clear song of the polyglot thrush, the famed mocking-bird of America.

No wonder the invalid, recovering from his illness, after the long dark spell that has obscured his intellect, wrapping his soul, as it were, in a shroud—no wonder he fancies the scene to be a sort of Paradise, worthy of being inhabited by Peris. One is there he deems fair as Houri or Peri, unsurpassed by any ideal of Hindoo or Persian fable—Adela Miranda. In her he beholds beauty of a type striking as rare; not common anywhere, and only seen among women in whose veins courses the blue blood of Andalusia—a beauty perhaps not in accordance with the standard of taste acknowledged in the icy northland. The vigolite upon her upper lip might look a little bizarre in an assemblage of Saxon dames, just as her sprightly spirit would offend the sentiment of a strait-laced Puritanism.

It has no such effect upon Frank Hamersley. The child of a land above all others free from conventionalism, with a nature attuned to the picturesque, these peculiarities, while piquing his fancy, have fixed his admiration. Long before leaving his sick couch there has been but one world for him—that where dwells Adela Miranda; but one being in it—herself.

Surely it was decreed by fate that these two should love one another! Surely for them was there a marriage in heaven! Else why brought together in such a strange place and by such a singular chain of circumstances?

For himself, Hamersley thinks of this—builds hopes upon it deeming it an omen.

Another often occurs to him, also looking like fate. He remembers ............