Looking out into the clear blue of the night from one of those jutting
balconies which constitute a summer luxury in the Creole city, the
eye sometimes marks the thin black threads which the telegraph wires
draw sharply against the sky. We observed last evening the infinitely
extending lines of the vast web which the Electric Spider has spun
about the world; and the innumerable wrecks of kites fluttering
thereupon, like the bodies of gaudy flies--strange lines of tattered
objects extending far into the horizon and tracking out the course of
the electric messengers beyond the point at which the slender threads
cease to remain visible.
How fantastic the forms of these poor tattered wrecks, when the
uniform tint of night robs them of their color, and only defines
their silhouettes against the sky!--some swinging to and fro
wearily, like thin bodies of malefactors mummified by sunheat upon
their gibbets--some wildly fluttering as in the agony of despair
and death--some dancing grotesquely upon their perches like flying
goblins--some like impaled birds, with death-stiffened wings,
motionlessly attached to their wire snare, and glaring with painted
eyes upon the scene below as in a stupor of astonishment at their
untimely fate.
All these represented the destruction of childish ambitions--each
the wreck of some boyish pleasure. Many were doubtless wept for, and
dreamed of afterward regretfully on wet pillows. And stretching away
into the paler blue of the horizon we looked upon the interminable hues
of irregular dots they made against it and remembered that each little
dot represented some little pang.
Then it was natural that we should meditate a little upon the vanity
of the ways in which these childish losses had been borne. The little
owners of the poor kites had hearts whose fibre differed more than that
of the kites themselves. Some might weep, but some doubtless laughed
with childish heroism, and soon forgot their loss; some doubtless
thought the world was all askew, and that telegraph wires ought never
to have been invented; some, considering critically the question of
cause and effect, resolved as young philosophers to profit by their
experience, and seek similar pleasures thereafter where telegraph
wires ensnared not; while some, perhaps, profited not at all, but only
made new kites and abandoned them to the roguish wind, which again
traitorously delivered them up to the insatiable enemies of kites and
birds.
Is it not said that the child is the father of the man?
And as we sat there in the silence with the stars burning in the
purple deeps of the summer night above us, we dreamed of the kites
which children of a larger growth fly in the face of heaven--toys
of love and faith--toys of ambition and of folly--toys of grotesque
resolve and flattering ideals--toys of vain dreams and vain
expectation--the kites of human Hope, gaudy-colored or gray, richly
tinseled or humbly simple--rising and soaring and tossing on the fickle
winds of the world, only to become entangled at last in that mighty web
of indissoluble and everlasting threads which the Weird Sisters spin
for all of us.