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Do you remember how dark it seems when one enters, and how gradually the wonderful coloring glows out from the gloom and one is comforted and soothed into a sort of dreamland of pure joy, in the intimate satisfaction of it all? It is unsurpassable for sheer decorative charm, I think. For south rooms blues and grays and cool greens and all the dainty gay colors are charming.
One evening, when she and Aunt Betsy had been dining alone, and had returned to the drawing-room, where it was Ida's custom at this hour to play her kind patroness to sleep with all the dreamiest and most pensive melodies in her extensive repertoire, the girl suddenly faltered in her playing, wandered from one air into another, and with a touch so uncertain that Aunt Betsy, who was fast lapsing into dreamland, became broad awake again all at once, and wanted to know the reason why.
She had never been tormented by womanhood, and she had lived in a dreamland of Tennysonian poesy, dense even to the full significance of that delicate master's delicate allusions to the grossnesses that intrude upon the relations of queens and knights. She had been asleep, always, and now life was thundering imperatively at all her doors.
Bobby Browne was holding forth, with his usual exuberance, on the magnificence of the British navy. The Marquess of B , uncle to the Princess, swelled with pride as he sat at the table and tasted his julep through the ever-obliging straw. The Princess, fanning herself wearily, leaned back and looked up into the mystic night, the touch of dreamland caressing her softly.
I told Josiah I hoped my vision would come true, and they would make an open park of Dreamland, so the millions who visit Coney Island could git a good look at Mom Nater and old Ocean. "And heaven knows," sez I, "there would be amusements enough left in Luny, and Steeple Chase Park, and other resorts all along the shore." And he said he didn't care a dum what they did with it.
As we left Surf Avenue I looked back on the blackened ruins of what had been the fair City of Dreamland, the broken totterin' remains of that glorious tower, the black tangled masses of iron and steel, the ruins of the great animal house mixed with the ashes of a hundred and twenty animals, and I see with my mind's eye that great flat plain of blackened ruins, all cleared away, and green velvety grass, and trees, and fountains sprayin' over shrubs, and flowers, and white smooth paths windin' through the bloom and verdure clear down to the clean sand of the water's verge.
Her father's sleep, and our consequent isolation, made me ill at ease. She, too, seemed so careless of my presence, so far away in dreamland, that I had to await opportunity, or rather her leave, to recall her from it. Finally she broke the silence herself.
Where in this vague dreamland of passive purity and heroism, of untempted chastity and untried honour, where are the earthly trials of Tristram, of Guenevere, of Rüdger, of Renaud? Where the moral struggles of the Middle Ages? Where is Godfrey, or Francis, or Dominick? Nowhere.
Without a book he moved about like a shadow lost in some dim dreamland of echoes. Everyone knew he was a scholar, and his thoughts had once or twice rung out to the world clear and loud as a trumpet-note through the oracles of the Press.
While on his part John Smith, with the same light in his face and the same fire in his eyes, went off in the prison van. He heard very little of what was going on around him. He seemed to be quite apart in some dreamland, some world of his own. When the coarse suit of prison clothes was brought to him, instead of the disgust the attendants expected to see, there came over his face a smile.