le they severed,--now
pushed the boat's head up into a wall of weeds, that bent back and let
it through the deep cut flooded by the rain, where the wild growth shut
off everything but the high hollow of a luminous sky, with
ribbon-grasses and long prickly leaves brushing across their faces from
either side, here and there a sudden dwarf palmetto bristling all its
bayonets against the peaceful night, and all the way singular uncouth
shapes of vegetation, like conjurations of magic, cutting themselves out
with minuteness upon the vast clear background so darkly and weirdly
that the voyagers seemed to be sliding along the shores of some new,
strange under-world,--now they got out, and, wading ankle-deep in plashy
bog, drew the boat and its slumberer heavily after them,--now went
slowly along, afloat again, on the broad lagoons, which the moon, from
the deep far heaven, shot into silver reaches, and, with the trees, a
phantom company of shadows, weeping in their veils along the farther
shore, with all the quaint outlines of darkness, the gauzy wings that
flitted by, the sweet, wild scents across whose lingering current they
drifted, the broad silence disturbed only by the lazy wash of a seldom
ripple, made their progress, through heavy gloom and vivid light, an
enchanted journey.

At length they lifted overhanging branches, and glided out upon a sheet
of open water, a little lake fed by natural springs; and here, paddling
over to the outlet, a tide took them down a swift brook to the river.
Sarp stemmed this tide, made the opposite bank of the brook, and paused.

"Have you chosen, Lome?" said he. "Will you go back with me, and so on
to the Happy Land of Freedom? Not that I'll have my own liberty till
I've earned it,--till I've won a country by fighting for it. But I'll
see you safe; and if I'm spared, one day I'll come to you. Will you go?"

Flor hung back a moment. "I'd like to go, Sarp, right well," said she,
twisting up the corner of her little tatter of an apron. "But dar am
Miss Emma, you see."

"We can leave her on the bank here. She'll be all right when de day
breaks, and fin' the house herself. There's as good as she without a
roof this night."

"She's neber been use' to it. She would n' know a step o' de way. Oh,
no, Sarp! I 'longs to Miss Emma; she could n' do widout me. She'd jus'
done cry her eyes out an' die,--'way here in de wood. No, Sarp, I mus'
take her back. She's delicate, Miss Emma is. I'd like to g