tales that gathered for more than a thousand years about the islands of
the Atlantic deep. Although they are a part of the mythical period of
American history, these hazy legends were altogether disdained by the
earlier historians; indeed, George Bancroft made it a matter of actual
pride that the beginning of the American annals was bare and literal. But
in truth no national history has been less prosaic as to its earlier
traditions, because every visitor had to cross the sea to reach it, and
the sea has always been, by the mystery of its horizon, the fury of its
storms, and the variableness of the atmosphere above it, the foreordained
land of romance.

In all ages and with all sea-going races there has always been something
especially fascinating about an island amid the ocean. Its very existence
has for all explorers an air of magic. An island offers to us heights
rising from depths; it exhibits that which is most fixed beside that which
is most changeable, the fertile beside the barren, and safety after
danger. The ocean forever tends to encroach on the island, the island upon
the ocean. They exist side by side, friends yet enemies. The island
signifies safety in calm, and yet danger in storm; in a tempest the sailor
rejoices that he is not near it; even if previously bound for it, he puts
about and steers for the open sea. Often if he seeks it he cannot reach
it. The present writer spent a winter on the island of Fayal, and saw in a
storm a full-rigged ship drift through the harbor disabled, having lost
her anchors; and it was a week before she again made the port.

There are groups of islands scattered over the tropical ocean,
especially, to which might well be given Herman Melville's name, "Las
Encantadas," the Enchanted Islands. These islands, usually volcanic, have
no vegetation but cactuses or wiry bushes with strange names; no
inhabitants but insects and reptiles--lizards, spiders, snakes,--with vast