it at last, from our beautiful lily world about
which our pleasant thoughts had ceased to flow even in bad poetry.

Our voyage was for information, which might be obtained at a certain
habitation; if not there, at a second one, or surely at a third and
most distant settlement.

The bayou narrowed into a canal, then widened into a bayou again, and
the low, level swamp and prairie advanced into woodland and forest.
Oak-trees began, our beautiful oak-trees! Great branches bent down
almost to the water,--quite even with high water,--covered with
forests of oak, parasites, lichens, and with vines that swept our
heads as we passed under them, drooping now and then to trail in the
water, a plaything for the fishes, and a landing-place for amphibious
insects. The sun speckled the water with its flickering patterns,
showering us with light and heat. We have no spring suns; our sun,
even in December, is a summer one.

And so, with all its grace of curve and bend, and so--the description
is longer than the voyage--we come to our first stopping-place. To the
side, in front of the well-kept fertile fields, like a proud little
showman, stood the little house. Its pointed shingle roof covered it
like the top of a chafing-dish, reaching down to the windows, which
peeped out from under it like little eyes.

A woman came out of the door to meet us. She had had time during our
graceful winding approach to prepare for us. What an irrevocable
vow to old maidenhood! At least twenty-five, almost a possible
grandmother, according to Acadian computation, and well in the grip
of advancing years. She was dressed in a stiff, dark red calico gown,
with a white apron. Her black hair, smooth and glossy under a varnish
of grease, was plaited high in the back, and dropped regular ringlets,
six in all, over her forehead. That was the epoch when her calamity
came to her, when the hair was worn in that fashion. A woman seldom
alters her coiffure after a calamity of a certain nature happens
to her. The figure had taken a compact rigidity, an unfaltering
inflexibility, all the world away from the elasticity of matronhood;
and her eyes were clear and fixed like her figure, neither falling,
nor rising, nor puzzling under other eyes. Her lips, her hands, her
slim feet, were conspicuously single, too, in their intent, neither
reaching, nor feeling, nor running for those other lips, hands, and
feet which should have doubled their single life.

That was Ado