Our Voices Sounded Thin In The Upper Air.

The keen, incisive wind that swept the summit, had no kinship with the soft breezes which were rustling the tasselled cane in the green fields of earth which had lately gleamed through the drift.

It was a new world and without sympathy, a solitude which could be felt. Was it nearer God, I wonder, because so far from man and his little works and ways? At least they seemed little there, in presence of the tokens of a catastrophe which had not only blown off a mountain top, and scattered it over the island, but had disembowelled the mountain itself to a depth of 2000 feet.

Soon after noon we began to descend; and in a hollow of the mountain, not far from the ragged edge of the crater, then filled up with billows of cloud, we came upon what we were searching for; not, however, one or two, but thousands of silverswords, their cold, frosted silver gleam making the hill-side look like winter or moonlight. They can be preserved in their beauty by putting them under a glass shade, but it must be of monstrous dimensions, as the finer plants measure 2 ft. by 18 in. without the flower stalk. They exactly resemble the finest work in frosted silver, the curve of their globular mass of leaves is perfect; and one thinks of them rather as the base of an epergne for an imperial table, or as a prize at Ascot or Goodwood, than as anything organic.

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