... Grande Terre is going: the sea mines her fort, and will
before many years carry the ramparts by storm. Grande Isle is
going,--slowly but surely: the Gulf has eaten three miles into
her meadowed land. Last Island has gone! How it went I first
heard from the lips of a veteran pilot, while we sat one evening
together on the trunk of a drifted cypress which some high tide
had pressed deeply into the Grande Isle beach. The day had been
tropically warm; we had sought the shore for a breath of living
air. Sunset came, and with it the ponderous heat lifted,--a
sudden breeze blew,--lightnings flickered in the darkening
horizon,--wind and water began to strive together,--and soon all
the low coast boomed. Then my companion began his story; perhaps
the coming of the storm inspired him to speak! And as I listened
to him, listening also to the clamoring of the coast, there
flashed back to me recollection of a singular Breton fancy: that
the Voice of the Sea is never one voice, but a tumult of many
voices--voices of drowned men,--the muttering of multitudinous
dead,--the moaning of innumerable ghosts, all rising, to rage
against the living, at the great Witch call of storms....


IV.

The charm of a single summer day on these island shores is
something impossible to express, never to be forgotten. Rarely,
in the paler zones, do earth and heaven take such luminosity:
those will best understand me who have seen the splendor of a
West Indian sky. And yet there is a tenderness of tint, a caress
of color, in these Gulf-days which is not of the Antilles,--a