Gentilly--corruption of Chantilly) was a navigable stream of wild and
sombre beauty.

On a certain morning in August, 1804, and consequently some five months
after the events last mentioned, there emerged from the darkness of
Bayou Sauvage into the prairie-bordered waters of Chef Menteur, while
the morning star was still luminous in the sky above and in the water
below, and only the practised eye could detect the first glimmer of day,
a small, stanch, single-masted, broad and very light-draught boat, whose
innocent character, primarily indicated in its coat of many colors,--the
hull being yellow below the water line and white above, with tasteful
stripings of blue and red,--was further accentuated by the peaceful name
of _Pique-en-terre_ (the Sandpiper).

She seemed, too, as she entered the Chef Menteur, as if she would have
liked to turn southward; but the wind did not permit this, and in a
moment more the water was rippling after her swift rudder, as she glided
away in the direction of Pointe Aux Herbes. But when she had left behind
her the mouth of the passage, she changed her course and, leaving the
Pointe on her left, bore down toward Petites Coquilles, obviously bent
upon passing through the Rigolets.

We know not how to describe the joyousness of the effect when at length
one leaves behind him the shadow and gloom of the swamp, and there
bursts upon his sight the widespread, flower-decked, bird-haunted
prairies of Lake Catharine. The inside and outside of a prison scarcely
furnish a greater contrast; and on this fair August morning the contrast
was at its strongest. The day broke across a glad expanse of cool and
fragrant green, silver-laced with a network of crisp salt pools and
passes, lakes, bayous and lagoons, that gave a good smell, the inspiring
odor of interclasped sea and shore, and both beautified and perfumed
the happy earth, laid bare to the rising sun. Waving marshes of wild
oats, drooping like sated youth from too much pleasure; watery acres hid
under crisp-growing greenth starred with pond-lilies and rippled by
water-fowl; broad stretches of high grass, with thousands of ecstatic
wings palpitating above them; hundreds of thousands of white and pink
mallows clapping their hands in voiceless rapture, and that amazon queen
of the wild flowers, the morning-glory, stretching her myriad lines,
lifting up the trumpet and waving her colors, white, azure and pink,
with lacings of spider's web, heavy with