BY MISS E. A. DUPUY
PART I.
There is peace in the Night of the Early Dead—
It will yield to a glorious morrow! Clarke.
Amid all the brightness and bloom which the imagination conjures up, when we think of the sunny islands lying within the tropics, many mournful associations arise and cast a sadness over the picture. Very few have not had within the circle of their relatives, or friends, some cherished one, who has vainly sought the balmy breezes of those favored spots, with the feverish hope that amid their loveliness Death would forget to launch his arrows for them.
Alas! to die among strangers is usually the fate of those who are thus lured from their homes by a deceitful hope. There, where Nature wears a perpetual verdure—where the fervid sun brings forth a luxuriance of vegetation unknown in more northern regions, the wearied spirit sinks to repose, soothed, or saddened, by the glow of existence around.
A spacious apartment on the southern side of a highly ornamented villa, opened into a magnificent garden, filled with orange-trees, oleanders, and many other gorgeous flowers peculiar to the climate of Cuba; while in the distance the sunlight gleamed upon a row of towering palms, whose stately columns, crowned by their verdant coronal, resembled the pillars of some mighty temple, which found a fitting canopy in the blue arch of heaven, glowing with the gorgeous hues of a tropical sunset.
The floor of this room was inlaid with marble of different colors, and the couch and windows were draped with snowy lace, lightly embroidered at the edges, and looped with cords of blue and silver—tables with marble tops, supporting porcelain vases filled with flowers, were placed between the windows, for these ephemeral children of sunshine were dear to the heart of the dying one. Beside one of these stood a large cushioned chair, in which reclined a young man of delicate features and wasted form. He appeared in the last stages of his fell disease, and the friends who had received him beneath their roof to die, wondered that he should have been deluded with the hope that health could ever again reanimate his bowed and shrunken form. There was an expression of care upon his sharpened features—a feverish restlessness in his manner, which betrayed the spirit's unrest.