ng broken half away. A tardy almond-tree was stirring
its tower of bloom in the sunshine up there; oranges were reddening on
an overhanging bough, whose wreaths of snowy sweetness made the air a
passionate delight; a luscious fruit dropped, with all its royal gloss,
into the river beside her, and she could not put out a hand to catch it.
She saw now all that passed, but no longer with any afterthoughts of
reference to herself; so sights might slip across the retina of a dead
man's eye; her identity seemed fading from her, as from some substance
on the point of dissolution into the wide universe. She felt like one
who, under an aesthetic influence, seems to himself careering through
mid-air, conscious only of motion and vanishing forms. Cultured uplands
and thick woods peopled with melodies all stole by, mere picture; the
long snake of the river crept through green meadowy shores haunted by
the cluck and clutter of the marsh-hen; from a bluff of the bank broke a
blaze of fire and a yelping roar, and something slapped and skipped
along the water,--a ball from a Rebel battery to bring the strange craft
to,--others followed and danced like demons through the hissing tide
that rocked under her and plunged up and down, tilting and turning and
half drowning the wreck. Flor looked at them all with wide eyes, at the
battery and at the bluff, and went by without any more sensation than
that dazed quiet in which, at the time, she would have gone down to
death with the soft waters laying their warm weight on her head, not
even thanking Fortune that in giving her a slippery plank gave her
something to elude either canister or catapult. Occasionally she felt a
pain, a strange parched pain; it burned awhile, and left her once more
oblivious. She slept a little, by fits and starts; sometimes the very
stillness stirred her. She listened and heard the turtle plumping down
into the stream, now and then the little fishes leaping and plashing,
the eels slipping in and out among the reeds and sedges at the side; far
away in the broad marshes, that, bathed in dim vapor, now lay all about
her, the cry of a bittern boomed; she saw a pair of herons flapping
inland over the gray swell of the water; there were some great purple
phantoms, darkly imagined monsters; looming near at hand:--all the
phantasmagoria drifted by,--and then, caught in the currents playing
forever by noon or night round the low edges of sand-bars and islets,
she was sweeping ou