And both seemed to mingle their influences kindly for her, as
if she was a thing that nature loved, even in her angry mood, and gave a
commission to the storm to nurture her, and to the deluge to spare the
ark of her innocence, as it floated over the waters. This existence of
felicity, half physical, half imaginative, but neither intellectual or
impassioned, had continued till the seventeenth year of this beautiful
and mild being, when a circumstance occurred that changed its hue for
ever. “On the evening of the day after the Indians had departed, Immalee, for
that was the name her votarists had given her, was standing on the
shore, when a being approached her unlike any she had ever beheld. The
colour of his face and hands resembled her own more than those she was
accustomed to see, but his garments, (which were European), from their
square uncouthness, their shapelessness, and their disfiguring
projection about the hips, (it was the fashion of the year 1680), gave
her a mixed sensation of ridicule, disgust, and wonder, which her
beautiful features could express only by a smile--that smile, a _native
of the face_ from which not even surprise could banish it. “The stranger approached, and the beautiful vision approached also, but
not like an European female with low and graceful bendings, still less
like an Indian girl with her low salams, but like a young fawn, all
animation, timidity, confidence, and cowardice, expressed in almost a
single action. She sprung from the sands--ran to her favourite
tree;--returned again with her guard of peacocks, who expanded their
superb trains with a kind of instinctive motion, as if they felt the
danger that menaced their protectress, and, clapping her hands with
exultation, seemed to invite them to share in the delight she felt in
gazing at the _new flower that had grown in the sand_. “The stranger advanced, and, to Immalee’s utter astonishment, addressed
her in the language which she herself had retained some words of since
her infancy, and had endeavoured in vain to make her peacocks, parrots,
and loxias, answer her in corresponding sounds. But her language, from
want of practice, had become so limited, that she was delighted to hear
its most unmeaning sounds uttered by human lips; and when he said,
according to the form of the times, “How do you, fair maid?” she
answered, “God made me,” from the words of the Christian Catechism that
had been breathed into her infant lip. “God never made a fairer
creature,” replied the stranger, grasping her hand, and fixing on her
eyes that still burn in the sockets of that arch-deceiver. “Oh yes!”
answered Immalee, “he made many things more beautiful. The rose is
redder than I am--the palm-tree is taller than I am--and the wave is
bluer than I am;--but they all change, and I never change. I have grown
taller and stronger, though the rose fades every six moons; and the rock
splits to let in the bats, when the earth shakes; and the waves fight in
their anger till they turn grey, and far different from the beautiful
colour they have when the moon comes dancing on them, and sending all
the young, broken branches of her light to kiss my feet, as I stand on
the soft sand. I have tried to gather them every night, but they all
broke in my hand the moment I dipt it into water.”--“And have you fared
better with the stars?” said the stranger smiling.--“No,” answered the
innocent being, “the stars are the flowers of heaven, and the rays of
the moon the boughs and branches; but though they are so bright, they
only blossom in the night,--and I love better the flowers that I can
gather, and twine in my hair. When I have been all night wooing a star,
and it has listened and descended, springing downwards like a peacock
from its nest, it has hid itself often afterwards playfully amid the
mangoes and tamarinds where it fell; and though I have searched for it
till the moon looked wan and weary of lighting me, I never could find
it. But where do you come from?--you are not scaly and voiceless like
those who grow in the waters, and show their strange shapes as I sit on
the shore at sun-set;--nor are you red and diminutive like those who
come over the waters to me from other worlds, in houses that can live on
the deep, and walk so swiftly, with their legs plunged in the water. Where do you come from?--you are not so bright as the stars that live in
the blue sea above me, nor so deformed as those that toss in the darker
sea at my feet. Where did you grow, and how came you here?--there is not
a canoe on the sand; and though the shells bear the fish that live in
them so lightly over the waters, they never would bear me. When I placed
my foot on their scolloped edge of crimson and purple, they sunk into
the sand.”--“Beautiful creature,” said the stranger, “I come from a
world where there are thousands like me.”--“That is impossible,” said
Immalee, “for I live here alone, and other worlds must be like
this.”--“What I tell you is true, however,” said the stranger. Immalee
paused for a moment, as if making the first effort of reflection--an
exertion painful enough to a being whose existence was composed of
felicitous tacts and unreflecting instincts--and then exclaimed, “We
both must have grown in the world of voices, for I know what you say
better than the chirp of the loxia, or the cry of the peacock. That must
be a delightful world where they all speak--what would I give that my
roses grew in the world of answers!”

“At this moment the stranger made certain signals of hunger, which
Immalee understood in a moment, and told him to follow her to where the
tamarind and the fig were shedding their fruit--where the stream was so
clear, you could count the purple shells in its bed--and where she would
scoop for him in the cocoa-shell the cool waters that flowed beneath the
shade of the mango. As they went, she gave him all the information about
herself that she could. She told him that she was the daughter of a
palm-tree, under whose shade she had been first conscious of existence,
but that her poor father had been long withered and dead--that she was
very old, having seen many roses decay on their stalks; and though they
were succeeded by others, she did not love them so well as the first,
which were a great deal larger and brighter--that, in fact, every thing
had grown smaller latterly, for she was now able to reach to the fruit
which formerly she was compelled to wait for till it dropt on the
ground;--but that the water was grown taller, for once she was forced to
drink it on her hands and knees, and now she could scoop it in a
cocoa-shell. Finally, she added, she was much older than the moon, for
she had seen it waste away till it was dimmer than the light of a
fire-fly; and the moon that was lighting them now would decline too, and
its successor be so small, that she would never again give it the name
she had given to the first--Sun of the Night.