ed occurrences in Good
Friday Island. This writing stunt done, his day was done. The rest was
dulness. Unutterable, grinding dulness--the monotony of dealing out
wares to customers, of keeping his accounts, of posting his records to
date, of performing his domestic chores.

From this dulness, though, there was sometimes an escape. To relieve the
monotony of his cheerless grind of duties and obligations there came to
him visions. And these visions, we may be very sure, mainly were induced
by what he had that day read and that day written. By virtue of a
special conjury residing in these waking dreams of his, the little man
peering nearsightedly at the shimmering white beach saw instead of a
beach the first heavy fall of snow upon the withers of the Green
Mountains; saw not unchanging stretches of sand but a blanket of purest
fleece, frilled and flounced and scrolled after the drift wind had
billowed it up in low places but otherwise smooth and fair except where
it had been rutted by sleigh runners and packed by the snow-boltered
hoofs of bay Dobbins and sorrel Dollies, the get of Morgan stock.

In the insane forest voices he heard the contented cacklings of fat hens
scratching for provender beneath the gnarled limbs of ancient apple
trees whose trunks all were so neatly whitewashed up to the lowermost
boughs. Looking upon the settlement where he lived, set as it was like a
white-and-green jewel in a ring of lush barbaric beauty, his fancy
showed him the vista of a spinsterish-looking Main Street lined by
dooryards having fences of pointed painted pickets, and behind the
pickets, peonies and hollyhocks encroaching upon prim flagged walks
which led back to the white-panelled doors of small houses buried almost
to their eaves in lilac bushes and golden glow.

The magic of it made all things to match in with the image: Thus, for
example, the tall palms with their feather-duster tops, bending
seaward, turned into broad elms standing in regular double rank, like
Yankee militiamen on a muster day. And night times, when through his
windows there came floating in the soft vowelsome voices of native
fishermen paddling their canoes upon the lagoon and singing as they
paddled, he felt himself translated many thousands of miles away to
Wednesday evening prayer meeting in a squat, brick church with a wooden
belfry rearing above its steep slated roof.

But in this last conjuring-up of a beloved scene there lay at the back
of the tr