206 ISLES OF SUMMER. 
hidden laws of the world of matter and mind are born of the 
north wind sweeping over the snow ficlds. 
Wandering through the wilderness of streets in the noisy Babel 
of the Empire State, only seventy-four miles from home, a little 
unassimilated globule in a great eddying, boiling sea of human 
life, separated and isolated from familiar scenes and faces, and 
from warm and sympathetic hearts, a murky and crushing fecl- 
ing of loneliness that we cannot dispel pervades the soul, and 
life for the time loses its value by reason of its comparative in- 
significance. But the frequent mails, the long lines of railroad, 
the locomotive with its ribs of steel and mouth of fire, the bridges 
of steamboats over all the deep separating water-ways, the perfect 
net-work of telegraph and telephone wires, like great life-roots, 
still closely unite and bind to the familiar places and faces that 
we have left behind us; while the morning press, that miracle of 
modern enterprise and invention—seems to so closely conncct us, 
that we realize that we are indeed a component part of the great 
world of human life, and we feel every pulsation of its great 
heart. But upon the little island of New Providence—a rock 
fast anchored in the great ocean—communication with the out- 
side world is so infrequent and contingent, that we seem when 
anxiously waiting, watching, and vainly longing for the arrival 
from Jacksonville of the only steamer that connects these islands 
with the mainland, like a little colony of Robinson Crusoes. 
On stepping from the deck of a steamer, upon one of the 
docks at Nassau, we have a consciousness that we are mere waifs 
on the ocean of life, dissevered and far away drifted from every- 
thing that makes a residence upon the sun’s little satelite desir- 
able. 
The tired worker, needing absolute quiet and rest, can find it 
‘there. But he must make up his mind not to be anxious or 
fussy about friends and business in his distant home. If, day 
