THERE is a bell in a tower in the middle of our Square. At six every morning that bell does its best to tip over in delirious joy, but a dozen strokes with the big tongue of it is about all that is ever accomplished.
I like to be wakened by that bell; I like to hear it at meridian when my day's work is nearly done. It is swinging at this very minute, and the iron hammer is bumping its head on either side, wrought with melodious fury.
The voice of it is so like the voice of a certain bell I used to hear in a dreamy seaside village off in the tropics, that I have only to close my eyes and I am over the seas again where I belong.
As it rings now, I fancy I am in a great stone house with broad verandahs, that stands in the centre of a grove of palms; across a dusty lane lies the churchyard, and in the midst of the congregation of the departed I catch a glimpse of the homely whitewashed walls of the old missionary church.
As the bell rings out at high noon, the pigeons flutter from the eaves of this old church, and sail about, half afraid, yet seeming to be a part of the service that is renewed from day to day.
In spirit I pace again those winding paths; I meet dark faces, that brighten as I greet them; I hear the reef-music blown in from the summer sea; through leafy trellises I look into the watery distance, across which white sails are wafted like feathers in an azure sky.
A dry and floating dust, like powdered gold, glorifies the air. The vertical sun has driven the shadows to the wall, and the dry pods of the tamarind rattle and crackle in the intense heat, or perhaps a cocoanut drops suddenly to the grass with a dull thud.
A vixenish hornet swaggers in at the window, dangling its legs, the very ghost of an emaciated ballet-girl, and pirouettes about my head while I sit statue-like, but presently flirts out of the window and is gone.
Do you think nothing transpires in this corner of the world? The Coolie who brings me my morning cocoanut, the milk of which I drink from the shell, is just now picking up leaves as big as a panama hat out in the croquet-ground. Is that a common sight?
Were I in Honolulu—the metropolis, you know—from my window I could see as of yore a singularly-shaped hill called Punch-bowl, that looms above the mass of foliage engulfing the pretty village. This Punch-bowl has been empty for ages, so have all the craters in that particular island.