bayou, as motionless as a sleeping
snake under its misty covert--to continue the poetical language or
thought. The ripples ran frightened and shivering into the rooty
thicknesses of the sedge-grown banks, startling the little birds
bathing there into darting to the nearest, highest rush-top, where,
without losing their hold on their swaying, balancing perches, they
burst into all sorts of incoherent songs, in their excitement to
divert attention from the near-hidden nests: bird mothers are so much
like women mothers!

It soon became day enough for the mist to rise. The eyes that saw it
ought to be able to speak to tell fittingly about it.

Not all at once, nor all together, but a thinning, a lifting, a
breaking, a wearing away; a little withdrawing here, a little
withdrawing there; and now a peep, and now a peep; a bride lifting her
veil to her husband! Blue! White! Lilies! Blue lilies! White lilies!
Blue and white lilies! And still blue and white lilies! And still! And
still! Wherever the veil lifted, still and always the bride!

Not in clumps and bunches, not in spots and patches, not in banks,
meadows, acres, but in--yes; for still it lifted beyond and beyond and
beyond; the eye could not touch the limit of them, for the eye can
touch only the limit of vision; and the lilies filled the whole
sea-marsh, for that is the way spring comes to the sea-marshes.

The sedge-roots might have been unsightly along the water's edge,
but there were morning-glories, all colors, all shades--oh, such
morning-glories as we of the city never see! Our city morning-glories
must dream of them, as we dream of angels. Only God could be so
lavish! Dropping from the tall spear-heads to the water, into the
water, under the water. And then, the reflection of them, in all their
colors, blue, white, pink, purple, red, rose, violet!

To think of an obscure little Acadian bayou waking to flow the
first thing in the morning not only through banks of new-blown
morning-glories, but sown also to its depths with such reflections as
must make it think itself a bayou in heaven, instead of in Paroisse
St. Martin. Perhaps that is the reason the poor poets think themselves
poets, on account of the beautiful things that are only reflected into
their minds from what is above? Besides the reflections, there were
alligators in the bayou, trying to slip away before we could see them,
and watching us with their stupid, senile eyes, sometimes from under
the