ew to
Flor, nothing precious; she could have given all the beauty of earth and
heaven for a crust of bread just then. She thought of the plantation
with a dry sob, but would not turn her face. She could not move much,
indeed, her position was so ticklish; hardy wretch as she was, she had
already become faint and famished: she contrived, resting her arms on
the crossbar, at last, to lay her head upon them; and thus lying,
perpetually bathed by the soft, warm dip and rise of the water, the pain
of hunger left her, and she saw the world waft by like a dream.

Slowly the evening began to fall. Flor marked the bright waters dim and
put on a bloomy purple along which rosy and golden shadows wandered and
mingled, stars looked timidly up from beneath her, and just over her
shoulder, as if all the daylight left had gathered in that one little
curved line, lay the suspicion of the tenderest new moon, like some
boatman of the skies essaying to encourage her with his apparition as he
floated lightly down the west. Flor paid heed to the spectacle in its
splendid quiet but briefly; her eyes were fixed on a great trail of
passion-flowers that blew out a gale of sweetness from their broad blue
disks. She had reached that hanging branch, lavishly blossoming here on
the wilderness, and had hung upon the tide beneath it for a while, till
she found herself gently moving back again; and now she swung slightly
to and fro, neither making nor losing headway, and, fond of such
sensuous delights, half content to lie thus and do nothing but breathe
the delicious odor stealing towards her, and resting in broad airy
swaths, it seemed, upon the bosom of the stream around her. By-and-by,
when the great blue star, that last night at the zenith seemed to
suspend all the tented drapery of the sky, hung there large and lovely
again, Flor, gazing up at it with a confused sense of passion-flowers in
heaven, half woke to find herself sliding down stream at last in
earnest. Her brain was very light and giddy; all her powers of
perception were momentarily heightened; she took notice of her seesawing
upon the ebb and flow, and understood that washing up and down the
shores, a mere piece of driftwood, life would long have left her ere she
attained the river's mouth, if she were not stranded by the way. The
branch of a cedar-tree came dallying by with that, brought down from
above the falls; she half rose, and caught at it, and fell back, but she
kept hold of it