gloom of those trees veiled and muffled in
their long webs and skeins of hanging moss, a great, magic flame of
rose and red and white burned steadily. You looked to see it vanish; you
could not imagine such a thing would stay. All idea of individual
petals or species was swept away in this glowing maze of splendor,
this transparent labyrinth of rose and red and white, through which you
looked beyond, into the gray gloom of the hanging moss and the depths of
the wild forest trees.

I turned back as often as I could, and to the last I caught glimpses
of it, burning, glowing, and shining like some miracle, some rainbow
exorcism, with its flooding fumes of orange-rose and red and white,
merging magically. It was not until I reached the landing, and made my
way on board again, that Hortense returned to my thoughts. She hadn't
come to see the miracle; not she! I knew that better than ever. And who
was the other man in the launch?

"Wasn't it perfectly elegant!" exclaimed the up-country bride. And upon
my assenting, she made a further declaration to David: "It's just aivry
bit as good as the Isle of Champagne."

This I discovered to be a comic opera, mounted with spendthrift
brilliance, which David had taken her to see at the town of Gonzales,
just before they were married.

As we made our way down the bending river she continued to make many
observations to me in that up-country accent of hers, which is a fashion
of speech that may be said to differ as widely from the speech of the
low-country as cotton differs from rice. I began to fear that, in spite
of my truly good intentions, I was again failing to be as "attentive" as
the occasion demanded; and so I presented her with my floral tribute.

She was immediately arch. "I'd surely be depriving somebody!" and on
this I got to the full her limpid look.

I assured her that this would not be so, and pointed to the other
flowers I had.

Accordingly, after a little more archness, she took them, as she had,
of course, fully meant to do from the first; she also took a woman's
revenge. "I'll not be any more lonesome going down than I was coming
up," she said. "David's enough." And this led me definitely to conclude
that David had secured a helpmate who could take care of herself, in
spite of the limpidity of her eyes.

A steel wasp? Again that misleading description of Mrs. Weguelin St.
Michael's, to which, since my early days in Kings Port, my imagination
may be said to hav