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There, as I looked upon Isora's tranquil and most youthful beauty, over which circled and breathed an ineffable innocence, even as the finer and subtler air, which was imagined by those dreamy bards who kindled the soft creations of naiad and of nymph, to float around a goddess, I could not believe that aught evil awaited one for whom infancy itself seemed to linger, linger as if no elder shape and less delicate hue were meet to be the garment of so much guilelessness and tenderness of heart.
On this she ran off into the drawing-room, and I heard her exclaim, "There's a great big beggar boy, and he says he is Jack our brother Jack." "Oh no, that cannot be!" I heard one of my other sisters reply. "Poor Jack was drowned long ago in the Naiad." "No, he was not," I couldn't help exclaiming; and without more ado I ran forward.
Before proceeding to extremities, however, he despatched the Naiad, Captain Spencer, to destroy a large 16-gun piratical brig, which had taken shelter under the fortress of Bona. The service was performed in the most gallant way by Lieutenant Quin, first lieutenant of the Naiad, with her boats, he having pulled in under a tremendous fire from the fortress, boarded and blown up the brig.
They had come to the dry fountain, with its great cracked basin, in the centre of which stood the parched naiad, pouring an endless nothing from her inverted vase. Forsaken and sad she looked. All the world had changed save her, and left her a memorial of former thoughts, vanished ways, and forgotten things: she, alas! could not alter, must be still the same, the changeless centre of change.
'Fredi's Naiad retreat, when she wishes to escape Herr Strauscher or Signor Ruderi, said Victor, having his grateful girl warm in an arm; 'and if they head after her into the water, I back her to leave them puffing; she's a dolphin. That water has three springs and gets all the drainage of the upland round us. I chose the place chiefly on account of it and the pines. I do love pines!
But the jet from it varied every day, fantastic and multiform, like the sports of a Naiad, sometimes shooting up like a tree, sometimes shaped as a convolvulus, sometimes tossing from its silver spray a flower of vermilion, or a fruit of gold, as if at play with its toy like a happy child. And near the fountain was a large aviary, large enough to enclose a tree.
Driven upon itself, his intellect became inquiring and its resources profound; admitted to their inmost recesses, he revelled among the treasures of ancient lore, and in his dreams of the Nymph and Naiad, or his researches after truth in the deep wells of the Stagyrite or the golden fountains of Plato, he forgot the loneliness of his lot and exhausted the hoarded enthusiasm of his soul.
He was descending a hill, holding to his lips a blade of grass, upon which he would occasionally blow a vigorous and ear-piercing blast. "Have you come at last, my naiad queen?" said the youth. "We were such pleasant companions last evening, that I came hither in the hope of finding you at your bath again."
I had written to Cross, informing him of my promotion, and his being appointed to the Diligente. I had been a fortnight with the admiral when the Naiad arrived with the prizes in company, and, my wound being now cured, I took leave of the admiral, and went down, that I might superintend the fitting out of my new vessel.
On board one of those delectable craft, a brig called the Naiad, I found myself when about fourteen summers had passed over my head. She must have been named after a negress naiad, for black was the prevailing colour on board, from the dark, dingy forecastle to the captain's state cabin, which was but a degree less dirty than the portion of the vessel in which I was destined to live.
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