Summer Cruising in the South Seas Author:Charles Warren Stoddard 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: THE CHAPEL OF THE PALMS. 'H, the long suffering of him who threads a narrow trail over the brown crust of a hill where the short grass lies flat in tropi... more »cal sunshine! On one side sleeps the blue, monotonous sea; on the other, crags clothe themselves in cool mist and look dreamy and solemn. The boy Kahele, who has no ambition beyond the bit of his foot-sore mustang, lags behind, taking all the dust with commendable resignation. As for me, I am wet through with the last shower; I steam in the fierce noonday heat. I spur Hoke the mule into the shadow of a great cloud that drifts lazily overhead, and am grateful for this unsatisfying shade as long as it lasts. I watch the sea, swinging my whip by its threadbare lash like a pendulum,—the sea, where a very black rock is being drowned over and over by the tremendous swell that covers it for a moment; but somehow the rock comes to the surface again, and seems to gasp horribly in a deluge of breakers. That rock has been drowning for centuries, yet its struggle for life is as real as ever. I watch the mountains, cleft with green, fern- cushioned chasms, where an occasional stream silentlydistils. Far up on a sun-swept ledge a white, scattering drift, looking like a rose-garden after a high wind, I know to be a flock of goats feeding. But the wind- dried and sun-burnt grass under foot, the intangible dust that pervades the air, the rain-cloud in the distance, trailing its banners of crape in the sea as it bears down upon us,—these annoyed me somewhat, and make life a burden for the time being ; so I spur my faithless HokŁ up a new ascent as forbidding as any that we have yet come upon, and slowly and with many pauses creep to the summit. Kahele, " the goer," belies his name, for he loiters everywhere and always ; yet I am...« less