Page 77 - 1928 Hartridge

A Memory
I here are exquisite bits of beauty which everyone encounters once or twice in his life— a fragment of music, a gliiupse of a sunset, a masterpiece
of art, a fleeting, friendly smile—which are heard or geen for only an in­ stant, but which linger forever in the memory. Few of us can explain
just why this certain sound or sight haunts us so sweetly and so persistently, yet in ourseK’es we feel that the remembrance needs no explaining.
Perhaps the most poignant experience of this kind that has ever been my good fortune “to enjoy came one evening when I was in a boat which chanced to pass the Belmont Chateau on Long Island. I'o the
people around me the Chateau appeared merely as the palatial summer home of a wealthy family, but to me it suggested the Taj Mahal, that matchless pearl of the East, or a fairy castle of snowy marble, placed by
Titania’s elves just where the greenest and most graceful pine trees could surround and shield it.
I he sun seemed to share my opinion, for its golden fingers lay gently on the Chateau walls and drew their loving touch slowly away. The dazzling monarch of the day was loath to leave the lovely house to th mercy of the menacing, purple-hlue shaciows which were advancing so eagerly from the woods to veil the gleaming whiteness in murky dusk.
But the laws of nature are inexorable and the sun hesitated but one more moment on the horizon and was gone. Inexorable too were the propellers
of our ship, and the Chateau was fast gliding out of range of my straining
eyes.
Suddenly, as the lights came on in the castle, it seemed to take the
shape of a bright-eyed Argus brooding there on the shore, some of his eyes wide open and staring, some with half-closed lids. I'he dark fgures Hitting behind the windows might have been the shades of Argus’s thoughts.
Late that night, though I was not there to see, I know that the giant grew very sleepy and closed all his hundred eyes, but tbe silvered waves mur­
mured musically at his feet, the moon shed her mantle of soft light over his sleeping form, the blue stars winked comfortingly
down from their settings in the black arch of heaven, and they all cher­
ished the Chateau as I have cherished its memory-
D. R. o'b., ’28.
Page Seventy-three