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CHAPTER LVI.
FIRE AND SWORD

The year the war began dates also, for New Orleans, the advent of two better things: street-cars and the fire-alarm telegraph. The frantic incoherence of the old alarum gave way to the few solemn, numbered strokes that called to duty in the face of hot danger, like the electric voice of a calm commander. The same new system also silenced, once for all, the old nine-o’clock gun. For there were not only taps to signify each new fire-district, – one for the first, two for the second, three, four, five, six seven, eight, and nine, – but there was also one lone toll at mid-day for the hungry mechanic, and nine at the evening hour when the tired workman called his children in from the street and turned to his couch, and the slave must show cause in a master’s handwriting why he or she was not under that master’s roof.

And then there was one signal more. Fire is a dreadful thing, and all the alarm signals were for fire except this one. Yet the profoundest wish of every good man and tender women in New Orleans, when this pleasing novelty of electro-magnetic warnings was first published for the common edification, was that mid-day or midnight, midsummer or midwinter, let come what might of danger or loss or distress, that one particular signal might not sound. Twelve taps. Anything but that.

Dr. Sevier and Richling had that wish together. They had many wishes that were greatly at variance the one’s from the other’s. The Doctor had struggled for the Union until the very smoke of war began to rise into the sky; but then he “went with the South.” He was the only one in New Orleans who knew – whatever some others may have suspected – that Richling’s heart was on the other side. Had Richling’s bodily strength remained, so that he could have been a possible factor, however small, in the strife, it is hard to say whether they could have been together day by day and night by night, as they came to be when the Doctor took the failing man into his own home, and have lived in amity, as they did. But there is this to be counted; they were both, though from different directions, for peace, and their gentle forbearance toward each other taught them a moderation of sentiment concerning the whole great issue. And, as I say, they both together held the one longing hope that, whatever war should bring of final gladness or lamentation, the steeples of New Orleans might never toll – twelve.

But one bright Thursday April morning, as Richling was sitting, half dressed, by an open window of his room in Dr. Sevier’s house, leaning on the arm of his soft chair and looking out at the passers on the street, among whom he had begun to notice some singular evidences of excitement, there came from a slender Gothic church-spire that was highest of all in the city, just beyond a few roofs in front of him, the clear, sudden, brazen peal of its one great bell.

“Fire,” thought Richling; and yet, he knew not why, wondered where Dr. Sevier might be. He had not seen him that morning. A high official had sent for him at sunrise and he had not returned.

“Clang,” went the bell again, and the softer ding – dang – dong of others, struck at the same instant, came floating in from various distances. And then it clanged again – and again – and again – the loud one near, the soft ones, one by one, after it – six, seven, eight, nine – ah! stop there! stop there! But still the alarm pealed on; ten – alas! alas! – eleven – oh, oh, the women and children! – twelve! And then the fainter, final asseverations of the more distant bells – twelve! twelve! twelve! – and a hundred and seventy thousand souls knew by that sign that the foe had passed the forts. New Orleans had fallen.

Richling dressed himself hurriedly and went out. Everywhere drums were beating to arms. Couriers and aides-de-camp were galloping here and there. Men in uniform were hurrying on foot to this and that rendezvous. Crowds of the idle and poor were streaming out toward the levee. Carriages and cabs rattled frantically from place to place; men ran out-of-doors and leaped into them and leaped out of them and sprang up stair-ways; hundreds of all manner of vehicles, fit and unfit to carry passengers and goods, crowded toward the railroad depots and steam-boat landings; women ran into the streets wringing their hands and holding their brows; and children stood in the door-ways and gate-ways and trembled and called and cried.

Richling took the new Dauphine street-car. Far down in the Third district, where there was a silence like that of a village lane, he approached a little cottage painted with Venetian red, setting in its garden of oranges, pomegranates, and bananas, and marigolds, and coxcombs behind its white paling fence and green gate.

The gate was open. In it stood a tall, strong woman, good-looking, rosy, and neatly dressed. That she was tall you could prove by the gate, and that she was strong, by the graceful muscularity with which she held two infants, – pretty, swarthy little fellows, with joyous black eyes, and evidently of one age and parentage, – each in the hollow of a fine, round arm. There was just a hint of emotional disorder in her shining hair and a trace of tears about her eyes. As the visitor drew near, a fresh show of distressed exaltation was visible in the slight play of her form.

“Ah! Mr. Richlin’,” she cried, the moment he came within hearing, “‘the dispot’s heels is on our shores!’” Tears filled her eyes again. Mike, the bruiser, in his sixth year, who had been leaning backward against her knees and covering his legs with her skirts, ran forward and clasped the visitor’s lower limbs with the nerve and intention of a wrestler. Kate followed with the cherubs. They were Raphael’s.

“Yes, it’s terrible,” said Richling.

“Ah! no, Mr. Richlin’,” replied Kate, lifting her head proudly as she returned with him toward the gate, “it’s outrageouz; but it’s not terrible. At least it’s not for me, Mr. Richlin’. I’m only Mrs. Captain Ristofalah; and whin I see the collonels’ and gin’r’ls’ ladies a-prancin’ around in their carridges I feel my humility; but it’s my djuty to be brave, sur! An’ I’ll help to fight thim, sur, if the min can’t do ud. Mr. Richlin’, my husband is the intimit frind of Gin’r’l Garrybaldy, sur! I’ll help to burrin the cittee, sur! – rather nor give ud up to thim vandjals! Come in, Mr. Richlin’; come in.” She led the way up the narrow shell-walk. “Come ’n, sur, it may be the last time ye’ do ud before the flames is leppin’ from the roof! Ah! I knowed ye’d come. I was a-lookin’ for ye. I knowed ye’d prove yerself that frind in need that he’s the frind indeed! Take a seat an’ sit down.” She faced about on the vine-covered porch, and dropped into a rocking-chair, her eyes still at the point of overflow. “But ah! Mr. Richlin’, where’s all thim flatterers that fawned around uz in the days of tytled prosperity?”

Richling said nothing; he had not seen any throngs of that sort.

“Gone, sur! and it’s a relief; it’s a relief, Mr. Richlin’!” She marshalled the twins on her lap, Carlo commanding the right, Francisco the left.

“You mustn’t expect too much of them,” said Richling, drawing Mike between his knees, “in such a time of alarm and confusion as this.” And Kate responded generously: —

“Well, I suppose you’re right, sur.”

“I’ve come down,” resumed the visitor, letting Mike count off “Rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief,” on the buttons of his coat, “to give you any help I can in getting ready to leave town. For you mustn’t think of staying. It isn’t possible to be anything short of dreadful to stay in a city occupied by hostile troops. It’s almost certain the Confederates will try to hold the city, and there may be a bombardment. The city may be taken and retaken half-a-dozen times before the war is over.”

“Mr. Richlin’,” said Kate, with a majestic lifting of the hand, “I’ll nivver rin away from the Yanks.”

“No, but you must go away from them. You mustn’t put yourself in such a position that you can’t go to your husband if he needs you, Mrs. Ristofalo; don’t get separated from him.”

“Ah! Mr. Richlin’, it’s you as has the right to say so; and I’ll do as you say. Mr. Richlin’, my husband” – her voice trembled – “may be wounded this hour. I’ll go, sur, indeed I will; but, sur, if Captain Raphael Ristofalah wor here, sur, he’d be ad the front, sur, and Kate Ristofalah would be at his galliant side!”

“Well, then, I’m glad he’s not here,” rejoined Richling, “for I’d have to take care of the children.”

“Ha! ha! ha!” laughed Kate. “No, sur! I’d take the lion’s whelps with me, sur! Why, that little Mike theyre can han’le the dthrum-sticks to beat the felley in the big hat!” And she laughed again.

They made arrangements for her and the three children to go “out into the confederacy” within two or three days at furthest; as soon as she and her feeble helper could hurry a few matters of business to completion at and about the Picayune Tier. Richling did not get back to the Doctor’s house until night had fallen and the sky was set aglare by seven miles’ length of tortuous harbor front covered with millions’ worth of burning merchandise. The city was being evacuated.

Dr. Sevier and he had but few words. Richling was dejected from weariness, and his friend weary with dejections.

“Where have you been all day?” asked the Doctor, with a touch of irritation.

“Getting Kate Ristofalo ready to leave the city.”

“You shouldn’t have left the house; but it’s no use to tell you anything. Has she gone?”

“No.”

“Well, in the name of common-sense, then, when is she going?”

“In two or three days,” replied Richling, almost in retort.

The Doctor laughed with impatience.

“If you feel responsible for her going get her off by to-morrow afternoon at the furthest.” He dropped his tired head against the back of his chair.

“Why,” said Richling, “I don’t suppose the fleet can fight its way through all opposition and get here short of a week.”

The Doctor laid his long fingers upon his brow and rolled his head from side to side. Then, slowly raising it: —

“Well, Richling!” he said, “there must have been some mistake made when you was put upon the earth.”

Richling’s thin cheek flushed. The Doctor’s face confessed the bitterest resentment.

“Why, the fleet is only eighteen miles from here now.” He ceased, and then added, with sudden kindness of tone, “I want you to do something for me, will you?”

“Yes.”

“Well, then, go to bed; I’m going. You’ll need every grain of strength you’ve got for to-morrow. I’m afraid then it will not be enough. This is an awful business, Richling.”

They went upstairs together. As they were parting at its top Richling said: —

“You told me a few days ago that if the city should fall, which we didn’t expect” —

“That I’d not leave,” said the Doctor. “No; I shall stay. I haven’t the stamina to take the field, and I can’t be a runaway. Anyhow, I couldn’t take you along. You couldn’t bear the travel, and I wouldn’t go and leave you here, Richling – old fellow!”

He laid his hand gently on the sick man’s shoulder, who made no response, so afraid was he that another word would mar the perfection of the last.

When Richling went out the next morning the whole city was in an ecstasy of rage and terror. Thousands had gathered what they could in their hands, and were flying by every avenue of escape. Thousands ran hither and thither, not knowing where or how to fly. He saw the wife and son of the silver-haired banker rattling and bouncing away toward one of the railway depots in a butcher’s cart. A messenger from Kate by good chance met him with word that she would be ready for the afternoon train of the Jackson Railroad, and asking anew his earliest attention to her interests about the lugger landing.

He hastened to the levee. The huge, writhing river, risen up above the town, was full to the levee’s top, and, as though the enemy’s fleet was that much more than it could bear, was silently running over by a hundred rills into the streets of the stricken city.

As far as the eye could reach, black smoke, white smoke, brown smoke, and red flames rolled and spread, and licked and leaped, from unnumbered piles of cotton bales, and wooden wharves, and ships cut adrift, and steam-boats that blazed like shavings, floating down the harbor as they blazed. He stood for a moment to see a little revenue cutter, – a pretty topsail schooner, – lying at the foot of Canal street, sink before his eyes into the turbid yellow depths of the river, scuttled. Then he hurried on. Huge mobs ran to and fro in the fire and smoke, howling, breaking, and stealing. Women and children hurried back and forth like swarms of giant ants, with buckets and baskets, and dippers and bags, and bonnets, hats, petticoats, anything, – now empty, and now full of rice and sugar and meal and corn and syrup, – and robbed each other, and cursed and fought, and slipped down in pools of molasses, and threw live pigs and coops of chickens into the river, and with one voiceless rush left the broad levee a smoking, crackling desert, when some shells exploded on a burning gunboat, and presently were back again like a flock of evil birds.

It began to rain, but Richling sought no shelter. The men he was in search of were not to be found. But the victorious ships, with bare black arms stretched wide, boarding nettings up, and the dark muzzles of their guns bristling from their sides, came, silently as a nightmare, slowly around the bend at Slaughterhouse Point and moved up the middle of the harbor. At the French market he found himself, without forewarning, witness of a sudden skirmish between some Gascon and Sicilian market-men, who had waved a welcome to the fleet, and some Texan soldiers who resented the treason. The report of a musket rang out, a second and third reëchoed it, a pistol cracked, and another, and another; there was a rush for cover; another shot, and another, resounded in the market-house, and presently in the street beyond. Then, in a moment, all was silence and emptiness, into which there ventured but a single stooping, peeping Sicilian, glancing this way and that, with his finger on trigger, eager to kill, gliding from cover to cover, and presently gone again from view, leaving no human life visible nearer than the swarming mob that Richling, by mounting a pile of ship’s ballast, could see still on the steam-boat landing, pillaging in the drenching rain, and the long fleet casting anchor before the town in line of battle.

Late that afternoon Richling, still wet to the skin, amid pushing and yelling and the piping calls of distracted women and children, and scuffling and cramming in, got Kate Ristofalo, trunks, baskets, and babes, safely off on the cars. And when, one week from that day, the sound of drums, that had been hushed for a while, fell upon his ear again, – no longer the jaunty rataplan of Dixie’s drums, but the heavy, monotonous roar of the conqueror’s at the head of his dark-blue columns, – Richling could not leave his bed.

Dr. Sevier sat by him and bore the sound in silence. As it died away and ceased, Richling said: —

“May I write to Mary?”

Then the Doctor had a hard task.

“I wrote for her yesterday,” he said. “But, Richling, I – don’t think she’ll get the letter.”

“Do you think she has already started?” asked the sick man, with glad eagerness.

“Richling, I did the best I knew how” —

“Whatever you did was all right, Doctor.”

“I wrote to her months ago, by the hand of Ristofalo. He knows she got the letter. I’m afraid she’s somewhere in the Confederacy, trying to get through. I meant it for the best, my dear boy.”

“It’s all right, Doctor,” said the invalid; but the physician could see the cruel fact slowly grind him.

“Doctor, may I ask one favor?”

“One or a hundred, Richling.”

“I want you to let Madame Zénobie come and nurse me.”

“Why, Richling, can’t I nurse you well enough?”

The Doctor was jealous.

“Yes,” answered the sick man. “But I’ll need a good deal of attention. She wants to do it. She was here yesterday, you knew. She wanted to ask you, but was afraid.”

His wish was granted.

CHAPTER LVII.
ALMOST IN SIGHT

In St. Tammany Parish, on the northern border of Lake Ponchartrain, about thirty miles from New Orleans, in a straight line across the waters of the lake, stood in time of the war, and may stand yet, an old house, of the Creole colonial fashion, all of cypress from sills to shingles, standing on brick pillars ten feet from the ground, a wide veranda in front, and a double flight of front steps running up to it sidewise and meeting in a balustraded landing at its edge. Scarcely anything short of a steamer’s roof or a light-house window could have offered a finer stand-point from which to sweep a glass round the southern semi-circle of water and sky than did this stair-landing; and here, a long ship’s-glass in her hands, and the accustomed look of care on her face, faintly frowning against the glare of noonday, stood Mary Richling. She still had on the pine-straw hat, and the skirt – stirring softly in a breeze that had to come around from the north side of the house before it reached her – was the brown and olive homespun.

“No use,” said an old, fat, and sun-tanned man from his willow chair on the veranda behind her. There was a slight palsied oscillation in his head. He leaned forward somewhat on a staff, and as he spoke his entire shapeless and nearly helpless form quaked with the effort. But Mary, for all his advice, raised the glass and swung it slowly from east to west.

The house was near the edge of a slightly rising ground, close to the margin of a bayou that glided around toward the left from the woods at its back, and ran, deep and silent, under the shadows of a few huge, wide-spreading, moss-hung live-oaks that stood along its hither shore, laving their roots in its waters, and throwing their vast green images upon its glassy surface. As the dark stream slipped away from these it flashed a little while in the bright open space of a marsh, and, just entering the shade of a spectral cypress wood, turned as if to avoid it, swung more than half about, and shone sky-blue, silver, and green as it swept out into the unbroken sunshine of the prairie.

It was over this flowery savanna, broadening out on either hand, and spreading far away until its bright green margin joined, with the perfection of a mosaic, the distant blue of the lake, that Mary, dallying a moment with hope, passed her long glass. She spoke with it still raised and her gaze bent through it: —

“There’s a big alligator crossing the bayou down in the bend.”

“Yes,” said the aged man, moving his flat, carpet-slippered feet a laborious inch; “alligator. Alligator not goin’ take you ’cross lake. No use lookin’. ’Ow Peter goin’ come when win’ dead ahead? Can’t do it.”

Yet Mary lifted the glass a little higher, beyond the green, beyond the crimpling wavelets of the nearer distance that seemed drawn by the magical lens almost into her hand, out to the fine, straight line that cut the cool blue below from the boundless blue above. Round swung the glass, slowly, waveringly, in her unpractised hand, from the low cypress forests of Manchac on the west, to the skies that glittered over the unseen marshes of the Rigolets on the farthest east.

“You see sail yondeh?” came the slow inquiry from behind.

“No,” said Mary, letting the instrument down, and resting it on the balustrade.

“Humph! No! Dawn’t I tell you is no use look?”

“He was to have got here three days ago,” said Mary, shutting the glass and gazing in anxious abstraction across the prairie.

The Spanish Creole grunted.

“When win’ change, he goin’ start. He dawn’t start till win’ change. Win’ keep ligue dat, he dawn’t start ’t all.” He moved his orange-wood staff an inch, to suit the previous movement of his feet, and Mary came and laid the glass on its brackets in the veranda, near the open door of a hall that ran through the dwelling to another veranda in the rear.

In the middle of the hall a small woman, as dry as the peppers that hung in strings on the wall behind her, sat in a rush-bottomed rocking-chair plaiting a palmetto hat, and with her elbow swinging a tattered manilla hammock, in whose bulging middle lay Alice, taking her compulsory noonday nap. Mary came, expressed her thanks in sprightly whispers, lifted the child out, and carried her to a room. How had Mary got here?

The morning after that on which she had missed the cars at Canton she had taken a south-bound train for Camp Moore, the camp of the forces that had evacuated New Orleans, situated near the railway station of Tangipahoa, some eighty miles north of the captured city. Thence, after a day or two of unavoidable delay, and of careful effort to know the wisest step, she had taken stage, – a crazy ambulance, – with some others, two women, three children, and an old man, and for two days had travelled through a beautiful country of red and yellow clays and sands below and murmuring pines above, – vast colonnades of towering, branchless brown columns holding high their green, translucent roof, and opening up their wide, bright, sunshot vistas of gentle, grassy hills that undulated far away under the balsamic forest, and melted at length into luminous green unity and deer-haunted solitudes. Now she went down into richer bottom-lands, where the cotton and corn were growing tall and pretty to look upon, like suddenly grown girls, and the sun was beginning to shine hot. Now she passed over rustic bridges, under posted warnings to drive slow or pay a fine, or through sandy fords across purling streams, hearing the monotone of some unseen mill-dam, or scaring the tall gray crane from his fishing, or the otter from his pranks. Again she went up into leagues of clear pine forest, with stems as straight as lances; meeting now a farmer, and now a school-girl or two, and once a squad of scouts, ill-mounted, worse clad, and yet more sorrily armed; bivouacking with the jolly, tattered fellows, Mary and one of the other women singing for them, and the “boys” singing for Mary, and each applauding each about the pine-knot fire, and the women and children by and by lying down to slumber, in soldier fashion, with their feet to the brands, under the pines and the stars, while the gray-coats stood guard in the wavering fire-light; but Mary lying broad awake staring at the great constellation of the Scorpion, and thinking now of him she sought, and now remorsefully of that other scout, that poor boy whom the spy had shot far away yonder to the north and eastward. Now she rose and journeyed again. Rare hours were those for Alice. They came at length into a low, barren land, of dwarfed and scrawny pines, with here and there a marshy flat; thence through a narrow strip of hickories, oaks, cypresses, and dwarf palmetto, and so on into beds of white sand and oyster-shells, and then into one of the villages on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain.

Her many little adventures by the way, the sayings and doings and seeings of Alice, and all those little adroitnesses by which Mary from time to time succeeded in avoiding or turning aside the suspicions that hovered about her, and the hundred times in which Alice was her strongest and most perfect protection, we cannot pause to tell. But we give a few lines to one matter.

Mary had not yet descended from the ambulance at her journey’s end; she and Alice only were in it; its tired mules were dragging it slowly through the sandy street of the village, and the driver was praising the milk, eggs, chickens, and genteel seclusion of Mrs. – ’s “hotel,” at that end of the village toward which he was driving, when a man on horseback met them, and, in passing, raised his hat to Mary. The act was only the usual courtesy of the highway; yet Mary was startled, disconcerted, and had to ask the unobservant, loquacious driver to repeat what he had said. Two days afterward Mary was walking at the twilight hour, in a narrow, sandy road, that ran from the village out into the country to the eastward. Alice walked beside her, plying her with questions. At a turn of the path, without warning, she confronted this horseman again. He reined up and lifted his hat. An elated look brightened his face.

“It’s all fixed,” he said. But Mary looked distressed, even alarmed.

“You shouldn’t have done this,” she replied.

The man waved his hand downward repressively, but with a countenance full of humor.

“Hold on. It’s still my deal. This is the last time, and then I’m done. Make a spoon or spoil a horn, you know. When you commence to do a thing, do it. Them’s the words that’s inscribed on my banner, as the felleh says; only I, Sam, aint got much banner. And if I sort o’ use about this low country a little while for my health, as it were, and nibble around sort o’ pro bono pūblico takin’ notes, why you aint a-carin’, is you? For wherefore shouldest thou?” He put on a yet more ludicrous look, and spread his hand off at one side, working his outstretched fingers.

“Yes,” responded Mary, with severe gravity; “I must care. You did finish at Holly Springs. I was to find the rest of the way as best I could. That was the understanding. Go away!” She made a commanding gesture, though she wore a pleading look. He looked grave; but his habitual grimace stole through his gravity and invited her smile. But she remained fixed. He gathered the rein and straightened up in the saddle.

“Yes,” she insisted, answering his inquiring attitude; “go! I shall be grateful to you as long as I live. It wasn’t because I mistrusted you that I refused your aid at Camp Moore or at – that other place on this side. I don’t mistrust you. But don’t you see – you must see – it’s your duty to see – that this staying and – and – foll – following – is – is – wrong.” She stood, holding her skirt in one hand, and Alice’s hand in the other, not upright, but in a slightly shrinking attitude, and as she added once more, “Go! I implore you – go!” her eyes filled.

“I will; I’ll go,” said the man, with a soft chuckle intended for self-abasement. “I go, thou goest, he goes. ‘I’ll skedaddle,’ as the felleh says. And yit it do seem to me sorter like, – if my moral sense is worthy of any consideration, which is doubtful, may be, – seems to me like it’s sort o’ jumpin’ the bounty for you to go and go back on an arrangement that’s been all fixed up nice and tight, and when it’s on’y jess to sort o’ ’jump into the wagon’ that’s to call for you to-morrow, sun-up, drove by a nigger boy, and ride a few mile’ to a house on the bayou, and wait there till a man comes with a nice little schooner, and take you on bode and sail off, and ‘good-by, Sally,’ and me never in sight from fust to last, ‘and no questions axed.’”

“I don’t reject the arrangement,” replied Mary, with tearful pleasantness. “If you’ll do as I say, I’ll do as you say; and that will be final proof to you that I believe you’re” – she fell back a step, laughingly – “‘the clean sand!’” She thought the man would have perpetrated some small antic; but he did not. He did not even smile, but lifted the rein a little till the horse stepped forward, and, putting out his hand, said: —

“Good-by. You don’t need no directions. Jess tell the lady where you’ boardin’ that you’ve sort o’ consented to spend a day or two with old Adrien Sanchez, and get into the wagon when it comes for you.” He let go her hand. “Good-by, Alice.” The child looked up in silence and pressed herself against her mother. “Good-by,” said he once more.

“Good-by,” replied Mary.

His eyes lingered as she dropped her own.

“Come, Alice,” she said, resisting the little one’s effort to stoop and pick a wild-pea blossom, and the mother and child started slowly back the way they had come. The spy turned his horse, and moved still more slowly in the opposite direction. But before he had gone many rods he turned the animal’s head again, rode as slowly back, and, beside the spot where Mary had stood, got down, and from the small imprint of her shoe in the damp sand took the pea-blossom, which, in turning to depart, she had unawares trodden under foot. He looked at the small, crushed thing for a moment, and then thrust it into his bosom; but in a moment, as if by a counter impulse, drew it forth again, let it flutter to the ground, following it with his eyes, shook his head with an amused air, half of defiance and half of discomfiture, turned, drew himself into the saddle, and with one hand laid upon another on the saddle-bow and his eyes resting on them in meditation, passed finally out of sight.

Here, then, in this lone old Creole cottage, Mary was tarrying, prisoner of hope, coming out all hours of the day, and scanning the wide view, first, only her hand to shade her brow, and then with the old ship’s-glass, Alice often standing by and looking up at this extraordinary toy with unspoken wonder. All that Mary could tell her of things seeable through it could never persuade the child to risk her own eye at either end of it. So Mary would look again and see, out in the prairie, in the morning, the reed birds, the marsh hen, the blackbirds, the sparrows, the starlings, with their red and yellow epaulets, rising and fluttering and sinking again among the lilies and mallows, and the white crane, paler than a ghost, wading in the grassy shallows. She saw the ravening garfish leap from the bayou, and the mullet in shining hundreds spatter away to left and right; and the fisherman and the shrimp-catcher in their canoes come gliding up the glassy stream, riding down the water-lilies, that rose again behind and shook the drops from their crowns, like water-sprites. Here and there, farther out, she saw the little cat-boats of the neighboring village crawling along the edge of the lake, taking their timid morning cruises. And far away she saw the titanic clouds; but on the horizon, no sail.

In the evening she would see mocking-birds coming out of the savanna and flying into the live-oaks. A summer duck might dart from the cypresses, speed across the wide green level, and become a swerving, vanishing speck on the sky. The heron might come round the bayou’s bend, and suddenly take fright and fly back again. The rattling kingfisher might come up the stream, and the blue crane sail silently through the purple haze that hung between the swamp and the bayou. She would see the gulls, gray and white, on the margin of the lake, the sun setting beyond its western end, and the sky and water turning all beautiful tints; and every now and then, low down along the cool, wrinkling waters, passed across the round eye of the glass the broad, downward-curved wing of the pelican. But when she ventured to lift the glass to the horizon, she swept it from east to west in vain. No sail.