Page:Psyche (1908).djvu/11

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Psyche

And she gazed at the horizon, and however much she gazed, she always saw more.

Close by were the green valleys, dotted with grazing sheep, soft meadows with fat cattle, waving corn-fields, canals covered with ships, and the cottage roofs of a village. Farther away were lines of woods, hill-tops, mountain-ridges, or a mass of angular, roughhewn basalt.

Still farther off, misty towers with minarets and domes, cupolas and spires, smoking chimneys, and the outline of a broad river. Beyond, the horizon became milk-white, or like an opal, but not a line more was there, only tint, the reflection of the last glow of the sun, as if lakes were mirrored there; islands rose, low, in the air, aerial paradises, watery streaks of blue sea, oceans of ether and light quivering nothingness! . . . .

And Psyche gazed and mused. . . . She was the third princess, the youngest daughter of the old king, monarch of the Kingdom of the Past. . . . She was always very lonely. Her sisters she seldom saw, her father only for a moment in the evening, before she went to bed; and when she had the chance she fled from the mumbling old nurse, and wandered along

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