The Saint Paul globe. (St. Paul, Minn.) 1896-1905, 1901-09-15
THE ORIENT AT OUR GATES.

New York Sun.
The first long hot spell of the sum-
mer came with waxing moon. Day
after day city and suburbs broiled be-
meath pitless sun; night after night
the brick walls and asphalt streets Of
the city yielded up the caloric stored
through sixteen hours of unclouded sun
shine, making the season of darkness
almost as terrible as that of day
To the suburbs evening brought re-
lief for the fields and woodlands have
less stored-up heat to release than the
brick and mortar of the town, and the
southwest wind at least counterfeited
GOODNESS. Shadrach, Meshach and Abed-
nego, each sitting beneath his own sub
urban vine and figtree, gazed south
ward in the direction of the seven times
heated furnace, whence as by a miracle
they had escaped unscorched, though net
without the smell of flame upon their
garments, and reflected that even the es-
tate of the commuter is not without it's
mitigations
Yet in the suburbs nearly twenty miles
northward from the battery the smell Of
the furnace was still in the air, an odor
as of some gigantic battle far away; and
it was tropic moon that rode high in
the tropic night, Transforming dim
stretches of familiar fields and wood
lands into the senlblance of Oriental or
South sea landscapes. The moon in the
zenith and the faint salty odor in the
air brought UP visions of the sound,
swelling warm in a soft rippled tide
through all the creeks and inlets of Pei
ham Bay park. Every breeze waited
languorous doors from the honeysuckle
thicl1ets and perfume from the crimson
ramblers robed in multitudinous flames.
r AS the night wore on, hot but not
sitting, the memory of the day down
town became merely an Internal vision.
The balsamed air was good to breathe
and the whole suburban landscape was
a scene of magic beneath the moon. Fire
flies swan dim and drowning in the mid
moonlight, birds that all day long had
painted beneath the heat with open bills
and half-raised wings crooned uneasily
on their perches; bats on velvet wing
wheeled in eccentric fight, a sort of visi-
Bile moving silence; far southwark a cop
perry tingle well above the horizon show
ed, where the furnace still eXhaled its
sulphurous breath into the sky.
A lawny mist scarcely dimmed the ra-
dance of the, moon, but rather served
to heighten the richness of its light,
and to fill the shadowy spaces with
sort of palpable mysterious gloom. 1t
seemed that the region might as easily
have been the suburbs of Venice or of
Bagdad as of New York, and the coun-
tury almost any but the twentieth.
Midnight found the atmosphere still
n1usky and tropical, the shadows dim and
soft as new-fallen snow, the whole sub
urban region silent save for the occa-
sional hot hiss of a passing trolley car.
AS for the moon. she hung low in the
west, gibbous and mellow, amid a rich
ly irradiated area of torrid sky, a feat
ing island of the blessed. When at
length she sank beneath the horizon
the long alternating lines of softest light
and shade were suddenly swallowed in
the vast of night and the suburban
world was left to a few hours OF dark
ness and silence before the earliest birds
should usher in another day OF gleam-
ing sunshine and torrid air.