Sylvan secrets Author:Maurice Thompson 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: BESIDE THE GULF WITH EUSKIN. Let me sketch a bit of landscape before I begin to write, a bit with which I have been so charmed day after day that I have not l... more »ooked at anything else. The point of view is a high swell of sand thinly set with tall, slender pine trees, and our seat is a smooth, weather-beaten log. Behind us is a dense forest, stretching away for miles, a forest in which the blooms and tassels are beginning to show, albeit it is the second day of February. Before us, and but 150 yards away, shines the white beach and pale blue water of the Gulf of Mexico. There is a sound overhead, a strange moaning, made by the breeze in the pine-tops, and the rhythmic sea-boom seems to flow close to the ground at our feet. We can see the sky in violet streaks and fragments through the foliage, and we can catch at times glimpses of stately ships standing far out along the horizon, apparently motionless, but in reality bowling along before a good breeze " from lands of snow to lands of sun." The temperature of the air is such that we need no wraps, and yet are not too warm, and there is a June-like balm felt with every breath we draw. Here is where my friend and I come to lounge—to " loaf and invite our souls." We have been reading Ruskin, too, or rather my friend has been reading aloud to me, while I have lain in a most receptive mood, watching the ever fresh color-changes of the landscape. Ruskin describes clouds, but how could he ever find a phrase with which to picture a gulf-cap, as I see it yonder in the far south-west, suspended between sea and sky? The fact is that here on the gulf coast I find some of the most delightful weather and many of the most charming bits of scenery I have ever enjoyed. One could almost afford to have a sharp attack of inflammatory rheumatism in...« less