FAMILY OF THE EPHEMERA.
(To be read in connection with the following poem, “Shut In.”)
Somewhere, sometime, I know not when or where, I have heard a strangely beautiful and beautifully strange and altogether wonderful story—a story of a pygmy people.
In the long, long ago that has slipped into the lethal tide of the flow of Time where even the years have forgotten the rolling chime that they used to sing to the shore of a heavenly clime (and where poets don’t ever, nor ever, nor ever rhyme), whence even Tradition, asleep, forgets to climb, so long ago that I don’t know but that the time still antedates all dates, there lived the Family of the Ephemera.
As the sun came up in the morning, the race came into existence. During the night, a toad-stool of wonderful dimensions had sprung up, and beneath this over-shadowing phenomenon, built by the genii of darkness, the first glint of the new day’s sun kissed the first born of a new race—the Adam and Eve of the Family called Ephemera.
As the sun arose, and ere, e’en years ere it showed its lower disk, the family increased most startingly. The whole of their known world was peopled. They developed the resources of their vast little land. They cultivated the soil. They delved in the mines for gold. They carried on commerce with their widely scattered selves. They built homes and cities. Their cities were magnificent, their houses built of exquisitely carved and polished stone quarried from a grain of sand. Each window was made of the filmy iridescence of a single sunbeam, and curtained with richly embroidered tapestries woven from threads of the delicate shadow cast by a single ray of spectral purple. Their tables were filled with all the rich and dainty micros of the land. Withal, they were a happy, though barbarous people.
The sun arose. Men of the present generation had already grown gray-headed, while myriads of their posterity were just starting on their paths. Generation after generation had already come and gone, each leaving the wealth of its history, its experience, its scientific researches, its learning to the inheritants of the next.
Centuries to them came and went, governments grew old, decayed, and passed into tradition, while others sprang up in their places;—for to this strange and fast-living people, our moments were days, our seconds were months, our minutes were years, our hours were centuries, and our days were ages untold that lap the two ends of time into one unbroken eternity.
The sun was mid-forenoon. The Family of the Ephemera had grown old and wise. They pointed with vaunting pride to their intelligence and prosperity, to their grand achievements reaching down the long, fretted colonnades of history and vanishing in the dim perspective of tradition’s mystery. They looked upon all around, beneath, and above them, and rejoiced that all was for them. Their wise philosophers pointed to the sun and said, “All for us!” They told and taught how that great sun had always remained in its present place; for even in the memory of the oldest inhabitants no one had ever known the sun to be in other place than now. Nay, even history knew it not. They said, however, that there was a tradition, but not authenticated by history nor by later scientific investigation, that the sun long, long æons ago had occupied a position nearer the horizon. They showed how and why all things were made for them; how the great toad-stool, towering an immeasurable distance above them, had been placed on earth for them, and them alone, and philosophized how it was impossible for another to exist in the universe. They rejoiced that their little world was created, and endowed with all its richest blessings, for none other than them. They were a happy people, and prosperous. Their want of wisdom made them more happy and more prosperous.