Como eu Atravessei Àfrica do Atlantico ao Mar Indico (Complete)

As I sat alone this evening beneath the porch, the autumn wind rose and passed amongst the garden trees, then died away in the distance with a low murmuring.

A strange thrill ran through me; the present with its aspects vanished; I saw no more the narrow though dearly loved limits which bound my home; the little garden, so calm and grey in the dewy twilight, was a wide and heaving sea; the low rustling of the leaves seemed the sound of the receding tide; the dim horizon became a circular line of light dividing wastes of waters from the solemn depths of vast skies, and I, no longer a woman sitting in my home within reach of a great city, but an idle, dreaming child, lay in the grassy nook at the end of our garden, whence I watched the ships on their distant path, or sent a wandering glance along the winding beach of sand and rock below.

A moment effaced years, and my childhood, with its home, its joys, and its sorrows, passed before me like a thing of yesterday.

Rock Cottage, as my father had called it, rose on a lonely cliff that looked forth to the sea.

It was but a plain abode, with whitewashed walls, green shutters, and low roof, standing in the centre of a wild and neglected garden, overlooked by no other dwelling, and apparently far removed from every habitation.

In front, a road, coming down from the low hills of Ryde, wound away to Leigh; behind, at the foot of a cliff, stretched the sea.

The people of Leigh wondered "how Doctor Burns could live in a place so bleak and so lonely," and they knew not that to him its charms lay in that very solitude with its boundless horizon; in the murmurs of the wind that ever swept around his dwelling; in the aspect of that sublime sea which daily spread beneath his view, serene or terrible, but ever beautiful