What Dreams May Come
WHAT DREAMS MAY COME. THE OVERTURE. Constantinople; the month of August; the early days of the century. It was the hour of the city's most perfect beauty. The sun was setting, and flung a mellowing glow over the great golden domes and minarets of the mosques, the bazaars glittering with trifles and precious with elements of Oriental luxury, the tortuous thoroughfares with their motley throng, the quiet streets with their latticed windows, and their atmosphere heavy with silence and mystery, the palaces whose cupolas and towers had watched over so many centuries of luxury and intrigue, pleasure and crime, the pavilions, groves, gardens, kiosks which swarmed with the luxuriance of tropical growth over the hills and valleys of a city so vast and so beautiful that it tired the brain and fatigued the senses. Scutari, purple and green and gold, blended in the dying light into exquisite harmony of color; Stamboul gathered deeper gloom under her overhanging balconies, behind which lay hidden the loveliest of her women; and in the deserted gardens of the Old Seraglio, beneath the heavy pall of the cypresses, memories of a
MACATAWA, 1907.
1. The Girl in the Chicken Coop
The wind blew hard and joggled the water of the ocean, sending ripples
across its surface. Then the wind pushed the edges of the ripples
until they became waves, and shoved the waves around until they became
billows. The billows rolled dreadfully high: higher even than the
tops of houses. Some of them, indeed, rolled as high as the tops of
tall trees, and seemed like mountains; and the gulfs between the great
billows were like deep valleys.
All this mad dashing and splashing of the waters of the big ocean,
which the mischievous wind caused without any good reason whatever,
resulted in a terrible storm, and a storm on the ocean is liable to
cut many queer pranks and do a lot of damage.
At the time the wind began to blow, a ship was sailing far out upon
the waters. When the waves began to tumble and toss and to grow
bigger and bigger the ship rolled up and down, and tipped
sidewise--first one way and then the other--and was jostled around so
roughly that even the sailor-men had to hold fast to the ropes and
railings to keep themselves from being swept away by the wind or
WHAT DREAMS MAY COME. THE OVERTURE. Constantinople; the month of August; the early days of the century. It was the hour of the city's most perfect beauty. The sun was setting, and flung a mellowing glow over the great golden domes and minarets of the mosques, the bazaars glittering with trifles and precious with elements of Oriental luxury, the tortuous thoroughfares with their motley throng, the quiet streets with their latticed windows, and their atmosphere heavy with silence and mystery, the palaces whose cupolas and towers had watched over so many centuries of luxury and intrigue, pleasure and crime, the pavilions, groves, gardens, kiosks which swarmed with the luxuriance of tropical growth over the hills and valleys of a city so vast and so beautiful that it tired the brain and fatigued the senses. Scutari, purple and green and gold, blended in the dying light into exquisite harmony of color; Stamboul gathered deeper gloom under her overhanging balconies, behind which lay hidden the loveliest of her women; and in the deserted gardens of the Old Seraglio, beneath the heavy pall of the cypresses, memories of a