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There it was embodied as Woman of Romance, sublime, divine, mysterious, with a heavenly mission to reform, ennoble, uplift men, of course, in a word to make over the world. The idea of it had come down from the darkness of the middle ages, that smelly and benighted period, had inflamed all romance, and was now spreading its last miasmatic touch over the close of the nineteenth century.
The largest of these rose somewhat precipitously from the water's edge to a height of about fifty or sixty feet quite high enough, at all events, to be above the level of the miasmatic fogs which gather on the surface of the water toward evening and on the very summit of this island, deliciously embowered with noble trees, were placed the various buildings appertaining to the piratical community.
There they had dwelt and held up a lamp of learning and comparative civilisation which shone brightly through the miasmatic mists of cruelty and bloodshed in the Middle Ages, and none can question that, under Moorish rule in Spain in those centuries, the arts of peace had flourished, and that science, agriculture, art, and learning had found generous and discriminating patronage in the courts of Còrdoba and Granada.
It was only the dark, black nights, the burning nights of June, when he beheld, as it were, a miasmatic marsh, the stagnant water of a dead and accursed sea, that filled him with gloom and grief; and then ever the same dreadful visions haunted his brain. The markets were always there.
Freeman, after emerging from the miasmatic hell and lake of Gehenna, had taken a succession of baths, with soap and friction, had been attended by a barber and a tailor, and had himself attended the best table to be found for love or money in the charming town of Panama.
Some years ago an attempt was made to build a highway across the protectorate, from coast to coast, but after sixty miles had been completed the project was abandoned. It was known as the Sketchley Road and ran through a rank and miasmatic jungle, it being said that every hundred yards of construction cost the life of a Chinese laborer and that those who were left died at the end.
In dry weather, a long string of the most disgusting, blackish-green, slime pools are left standing on this bank, from the depths of which bubbles of miasmatic gas constantly arise and give forth a stench unendurable even on the bridge forty or fifty feet above the surface of the stream.
Here they lived during the healthy part of the year, but fled thence to summer resort in the highlands as the miasmatic season approached. The people we saw at the stations along our route were melancholy illustrations of the evils of the rule of such an oligarchy. There was no middle class visible anywhere nothing but the two extremes.
Like the ashen-grey hue that bedims the countenance of the dying, a filmy greasy skin appeared to overspread the recent loveliness of the ocean surface. The sea was sick, stagnant, and foul, from its turbid waters arose a miasmatic vapour like a breath of decay, which clung clammily to the palate and dulled all the senses.
There were none of those cataclysms of mire and sloughs of black mud and over-tall grasses, none of that miasmatic jungle with its noxious emissions; it was just such a scene as one may find before an English mansion a noble expanse of lawn and sward, with boscage sufficient to agreeably diversify it.
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