And then it is not shaped so much like a round dome as
the sky of the earth, but, more of an egg-shape, rises to a great
towering height in the middle, appearing far more lofty than the
other. When the stars come out at night, it shows a mighty
cupola, "fretted with golden fires," wherein there is room for
all tempests to rush and rave.
One evening in early summer, I stood with a group of men and
women on a steep rock that overhung the sea. They were all
questioning me about my world and the ways thereof. In making
reply to one of their questions, I was compelled to say that
children are not born in the Earth as with them. Upon this I was
assailed with a whole battery of inquiries, which at first I
tried to avoid; but, at last, I was compelled, in the vaguest
manner I could invent, to make some approach to the subject in
question. Immediately a dim notion of what I meant, seemed to
dawn in the minds of most of the women. Some of them folded
their great wings all around them, as they generally do when in
the least offended, and stood erect and motionless. One spread
out her rosy pinions, and flashed from the promontory into the
gulf at its foot. A great light shone in the eyes of one maiden,
who turned and walked slowly away, with her purple and white
wings half dispread behind her. She was found, the next morning,
dead beneath a withered tree on a bare hill-side, some miles
inland.
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