icans; yet who knows if sunbonnets and boots and all of us wouldn't
have become just as detestable had we but been as she was, swollen and
puffy with the acute indigestion of sudden wealth?

This reflection made me charitable, which I always like to be, and I
imparted it to the bride.

"My!" she said. And I really don't know what that meant.

But presently I understood well why people endured the discomfort of
this journey. I forgot the cinders which now and then showered upon us,
and the heat of the sun, and the crowded chairs; I forgot the boat and
myself, in looking at the passing shores. Our course took us round
Kings Port on three sides. The calm, white town spread out its width
and length beneath a blue sky softer than the tenderest dream; the white
steeples shone through the enveloping brightness, taking to each
other, and to the distant roofs beneath them, successive and changing
relations, while the dwindling mass of streets and edifices followed
more slowly the veering of the steeples, folded upon itself, and
refolded, opened into new shapes and closed again, dwindling always,
and always white and beautiful; and as the far-off vision of it held
the eye, the few masts along the wharves grew thin and went out into
invisibility, the spires became as masts, the distant drawbridge through
which we had passed sank down into a mere stretching line, and shining
Kings Port was dissolved in the blue of water and of air.

The curving and the narrowing of the river took it at last from view;
and after it disappeared the spindling chimneys and their smoke, which
were along the bank above the town and bridge, leaving us to progress
through the solitude of marsh and wood and shore. The green levels of
stiff salt grass closed in upon the breadth of water, and we wound among
them, looking across their silence to the deeper silence of the woods
that bordered them, the brooding woods, the pines and the liveoaks,
misty with the motionless hanging moss, and misty also in that Southern
air that deepened when it came among their trunks to a caressing,
mysterious, purple veil. Every line of this landscape, the straight
forest top, the feathery breaks in it of taller trees, the curving
marsh, every line and every hue and every sound inscrutably spoke
sadness. I heard a mocking-bird once in some blossoming wild fruit tree
that we gradually reached and left gradually behind; and more than once
I saw other blossoms, and the yellow of