Chita : a Memory of Lart Island. By Lefcadio Hearn.
(Harper Brothers, New York.)—Beyond the sea-marshes at the mouth of the Mississippi lies a "curious archipelago," once the resort of pirates, freebooters, and sea-robbers, now the home of a strange population of waifs and fisher-folks, whose nationality, except that they are technically citizens of the United States, it would • be hard to decide. The blood that runs in their veins is as mixed as the languages in which they express their thoughts. All pro- bably know English; but the mother-tongue of some is Spanish, of others Italian, of others, again, Creole-French. The islands themselves are flat, low-lying, and tropically luxuriant. At certain seasons they enjoy a superb climate. Says our author, who knows them well :—" The charm of a single summer day on these island shores is something impossible to express, never to be forgotten. Rarely, in the paler zones, do earth and heaven take such luminosity : those will best understand me who have seen the
splendour of a West Indian sky All, all is blue in the calm,—save the low land under your feet, which you almost forget, since it seems only as a tiny green flake afloat in the liquid eternity of days." But there are times when these isles of beauty become a veritable pan- demonium, when they are lashed by terrible storms, when fierce waves curl over their low-lying shores, make mighty
breaches in their sandy ramparts, and sweep away houses and villages. The islands, in fact, are being devoured by the sea. Several have already disappeared, and the time cannot be far distant when all will be gone. Mr. Hearn has interwoven with his vivid description of this " strange archipelago " a beautiful and pathetic romance, racy of the soil, in which, if we mistake not, he has turned to good account incidents that have really hap- pened, and character studied from the life. At any rate, it is a lifelike and touching story, and Chitah is a book which deserves high praise as well for its excellent, if at times somewhat florid literary style, and the vigour of its descriptive passages, as for the interest of its story. But why does Mr. Hearn say " nacre " when he means "mother-of-pearl," " gracile " when he means "slender," and " silhouette " when he means " dark outline "
Previous page
