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- hermit-sun, hutted in an Adullum cave, well towards the south,
according to his season, did little else but, by indirect reflection of
narrow rays shot down a Simplon pass among the clouds, just steadily
paint one small, round, strawberry mole upon the wan cheek of
northwestern hills. Signal as a candle. One spot of radiance, where all
else was shade.
Fairies there, thought I; some haunted ring where fairies dance.
Time passed; and the following May, after a gentle shower upon the
mountains—a little shower islanded in misty seas of sunshine; such a
distant shower—and sometimes two, and three, and four of them, all
visible together in different parts—as I love to watch from the piazza,
instead of thunder storms, as I used to, which wrap old Greylock, like
a Sinai, till one thinks swart Moses must be climbing among scathed
hemlocks there; after, I say, that, gentle shower, I saw a rainbow,
resting its further end just where, in autumn, I had marked the mole.
Fairies there, thought I; remembering that rainbows bring out the
blooms, and that, if one can but get to the rainbow’s end, his fortune
is made in a bag of gold. Yon rainbow’s end, would I were there,
thought I. And none the less I wished it, for now first noticing what
seemed some sort of glen, or grotto, in the mountain side; at least,
whatever it was, viewed through the rainbow’s medium, it glowed like
the Potosi mine. But a work-a-day neighbor said, no doubt it was but
some old barn—an abandoned one, its broadside beaten in, the acclivity
its background. But I, though I had never been there, I knew better.
A few days after, a cheery sunrise kindled a golden sparkle in the same
spot as before. The sparkle was of that vividness, it seemed as if it
could only come from glass. The building, then—if building, after all,
it was—could, at least, not be a barn, much less an abandoned one;
stale hay ten years musting in it. No; if aught built by mortal, it
must be a cottage; perhaps long vacant and dismantled, but this very
spring magically fitted up and glazed.
Again, one noon, in the same direction, I marked, over dimmed tops of
terraced foliage, a broader gleam, as of a silver buckler, held
sunwards over some croucher’s head; which gleam, experience in like
cases taught, must come from a roof newly shingled. This, to me, made
pretty sure the recent occupancy of that far cot in fairy land.
Day after day, now, full of interest in my discovery, what time I could
spare from reading the Midsummer’s Night Dream, and all about Titania,
wishfully I gazed off towards the hills; but in vain. Either troops of
shadows, an imperial guard, with slow pace and solemn, defiled along
the steeps; or, routed by pursuing light, fled broadcast from east to
west—old wars of Lucifer and Michael; or the mountains, though unvexed
by these mirrored sham fights in the sky, had an atmosphere otherwise
unfavorable for fairy views. I was sorry; the more so, because I had to
keep my chamber for some time after—which chamber did not face those
hills.
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