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Project Gutenberg's Chita: A Memory of Last Island, by Lafcadio Hearn This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net Title: Chita: A Memory of Last Island Author: Lafcadio Hearn Posting Date: August 16, 2008 [EBook #717] Release Date: November, 1996 Language: English Character set encoding: ASCII *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CHITA: A MEMORY OF LAST ISLAND *** Produced by Tokuya Matsumoto. HTML version by Al Haines. CHITA: A Memory of Last Island by Lafcadio Hearn "But Nature whistled with all her winds, Did as she pleased, and went her way." --Emerson To my friend Dr. Rodolfo Matas of New Orleans Contents The Legend of L'Ile Derniere Out of the Sea's Strength The Shadow of the Tide The Legend of L'Ile Derniere I. Travelling south from New Orleans to the Islands, you pass through a strange land into a strange sea, by various winding waterways. You can journey to the Gulf by lugger if you please; but the trip may be made much more rapidly and agreeably on some one of those light, narrow steamers, built especially for bayou-travel, which usually receive passengers at a point not far from the foot of old Saint-Louis Street, hard by the sugar-landing, where there is ever a pushing and flocking of steam craft--all striving for place to rest their white breasts against the levee, side by side,--like great weary swans. But the miniature steamboat on which you engage passage to the Gulf never lingers long in the Mississippi: she crosses the river, slips into some canal-mouth, labors along the artificial channel awhile, and then leaves it with a scream of joy, to puff her free way down many a league of heavily shadowed bayou. Perhaps thereafter she may bear you through the immense silence of drenched rice-fields, where the yellow-green level is broken at long intervals by the black silhouette of some irrigating machine;--but, whichever of the five different routes be pursued, you will find yourself more than once floating through sombre mazes of swamp-forest,--past assemblages of cypresses all hoary with the parasitic tillandsia, and grotesque as gatherings of fetich-gods. Ever from river or from lakelet the s
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