hair on
the veranda behind her. There was a slight palsied oscillation in his
head. He leaned forward somewhat on a staff, and as he spoke his entire
shapeless and nearly helpless form quaked with the effort. But Mary, for
all his advice, raised the glass and swung it slowly from east to west.

The house was near the edge of a slightly rising ground, close to the
margin of a bayou that glided around toward the left from the woods at
its back, and ran, deep and silent, under the shadows of a few huge,
wide-spreading, moss-hung live-oaks that stood along its hither shore,
laving their roots in its waters, and throwing their vast green images
upon its glassy surface. As the dark stream slipped away from these it
flashed a little while in the bright open space of a marsh, and, just
entering the shade of a spectral cypress wood, turned as if to avoid it,
swung more than half about, and shone sky-blue, silver, and green as it
swept out into the unbroken sunshine of the prairie.

It was over this flowery savanna, broadening out on either hand, and
spreading far away until its bright green margin joined, with the
perfection of a mosaic, the distant blue of the lake, that Mary,
dallying a moment with hope, passed her long glass. She spoke with it
still raised and her gaze bent through it:--

"There's a big alligator crossing the bayou down in the bend."

"Yes," said the aged man, moving his flat, carpet-slippered feet a
laborious inch; "alligator. Alligator not goin' take you 'cross lake. No
use lookin'. 'Ow Peter goin' come when win' dead ahead? Can't do it."

Yet Mary lifted the glass a little higher, beyond the green, beyond the
crimpling wavelets of the nearer distance that seemed drawn by the
magical lens almost into her hand, out to the fine, straight line that
cut the cool blue below from the boundless blue above. Round swung the
glass, slowly, waveringly, in her unpractised hand, from the low cypress
forests of Manchac on the west, to the skies that glittered over the
unseen marshes of the Rigolets on the farthest east.

"You see sail yondeh?" came the slow inquiry from behind.

"No," said Mary, letting the instrument down, and resting it on the
balustrade.

"Humph! No! Dawn't I tell you is no use look?"

"He was to have got here three days ago," said Mary, shutting the glass
and gazing in anxious abstraction across the prairie.

The Spanish Creole grunted.

"When win' change, he goin' start. He dawn't start