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CHAPTER XXI. 



MUSCALONGE. 



EVERY person has, more or less, a conception of what 

 Fairyland must be like. My ideas run into caves and 

 grottoes, with shady nooks and flower-clad rocks, ferns 

 luxuriously covering jagged peaks, and creepers festooning 

 imaginary roofs ; one moment the eye resting upon the 

 evanescent oleander ; at another, gazing with admiration 

 upon the pure and spotless water-lily ; but to leave the 

 realms of fancy and return to reality is but the work of 

 an instant, the arousing of the sleeping man to the realities 

 of life. 



Fancy the season of the year autumn, the day cloudless, 

 with the bluest and most transparent sky overhead that 

 mortal ever gazed upon, the water underneath your keel 

 the most pellucid, rapid, and laughing that eye ever rested 

 on, hundreds of islands on every side of the most fantastic 

 shapes, trees and shrubs crowding every available inch of 

 soil, covered with the most gorgeous colourings that ever 

 were represented by the arc of heaven, and a distance so 



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