with prolonged oscitations. "You are on hand early _this_ time, a'n't
you? You're the first live man I've seen since I got up."

So saying, he vanished, and reappearing in a moment with a huge brass
key, entered the arch, unlocked the gate which closed the aperture
fronting the east like the cover of a porthole, and sent it with a heavy
push wide open.

Wading through the flood of sunlight which poured into the
passage-way----But stop! I was about,--who knows?--in imitation of
divers admired models, to tell the reader in choicest poetic diction how
the City of the Dead, with its magnificent streets, shining palaces, and
lofty monuments, burst upon my dazzled vision,--how I walked for half a
mile along a spacious avenue, beneath an arcade of giant elms hung with
wreaths of mist and vocal with singing, feathery fruit,--past marble
tombs whose yards were filled with bright and fragrant flowers,--
among waving grassy knolls spread with the silver nets of spiders and
sparkling dew,--through vales of cool twilight and ravines of sombre
dusk,--and so on for more than a page, until finally, step by step,
through laboriously elegant sentences, I worked my way up to the top
of a lofty hill, the view from which to be graphically described as a
picture and a poem dissolved together into mingled glory and mirage, and
inundating with a billowy sea of beauty the landscape below;--and then
further depicting to the delighted fancy of the reader, how on one
side was a most remarkable river,--such as was never heard of before,
probably,--in fact, a web of water framed between the hills, its rushing
warp-currents, as it rolled along, woven by smoking steam-shuttles with
a woof of foam,--how, at the entrance of a bay, flocks of snowy sails,
with black, shining beaks, and sleek, unruffled plumage, were swimming
out to sea,--how another river, not quite so unique as the last, was
also in sight, coiling among emerald steeps and crags and precipices
and forest,--while beyond, green woodlands, checkered fields, groves,
orchards, villages, hills, farms, and villas, all glowed in an
exceedingly charming manner in the morning sun;--and then, still
further, to say something as brilliant as possible about a certain
city, designated as the Great Metropolis,--how it resembled, perhaps,
a Cyclopean type-form, with blocks of buildings for letters, domes,
turrets, and towers for punctuation-points, church-spires for
interrogation and exclamation marks,