Chita a memory of Last Island Author:Lafcadio Hearn Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: OUT OF THE SEA'S STRENGTH. INHERE are regions of Louisiana JL coast whose aspect seems not of the present, but of the immemorial past —of that epoch when low... more » flat reaches of primordial continent first rose into form above a Silurian Sea. To indulge this geologic dream, any fervid and breezeless day there, it is only necessary to ignore the evolutional protests of a few blue asters or a few composite flowers of the coryopsis sort, which contrive to display their rare flashes of color through the general waving of cat-heads, blood-weeds, wild cane, and marsh grasses. For, at a hasty glance, the general appearance ofthis marsh verdure is vague enough, as it ranges away towards the sand, to convey the idea of amphibious vegetation, — a primitive flora as yet undecided whether to retain marine habits and forms, or to assume terrestrial ones;— and the occasional inspection of surprising shapes might strengthen this fancy. Queer flat-lying and many-branching things, which resemble sea-weeds in juiciness and color and consistency, crackle under your feet from time to time; the moist and weighty air seems heated rather from below than from above,—less by the sun than by the radiation of a cooling world; and the mists of morning or evening appear to simulate the vapory exhalation of volcanic forces,—latent, but only dozing, and uncomfortably close to the surface. And indeed geologists have actually averred that those rare elevations of the soil,—which, with their heavy coronets of evergreen foliage, not only look like islands, but are so called in the French nomenclature of the coast,—have been prominences created by ancient mud volcanoes. The family of a Spanish fisherman, Fe- liu Viosca, once occupied and gave its name to such an islet, quite close to the Gulf-shore,—the loftiest b...« less