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MARGARET BENSON.

THE GATES OF GOLD

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The favourite game with Noah’s Ark was to make the nursery table an Island of Delight. The Delight must have centred in the looking-glasses, which, with frames discreetly hidden in moss, mirrored in their unruffled surfaces forms of numerous ducks and geese and other less decided species of birds. Certainly the other furnishings of the Island were not particularly delightful, for it was thickly populated with wild beasts of horrid aspect and defective limbs, and specimens of that strange pinkish animal of which Noah is so fond, and which may be classified with equal probability as a Dingo or a Wild Boar.

My earliest ideas of an Oasis were combined of this Island of Delight and of the description of Elim. The Oasis would be round as the nursery table; it would be covered with lush green grass like a water-meadow. It would have about seventy palm-trees standing at fairly regular intervals, and between the palm-trees there would be (instead of the looking-glasses) bubbling springs of water crystal-clear.