re girls in those unfamiliar villages worthy to
inspire any statuary,--beautiful with the beauty of ruddy
bronze,--gracile as the palmettoes that sway above them.... Further
seaward you may also pass a Chinese settlement: some queer camp of
wooden dwellings clustering around a vast platform that stands above
the water upon a thousand piles;--over the miniature wharf you can
scarcely fail to observe a white sign-board painted with crimson
ideographs. The great platform is used for drying fish in the sun; and
the fantastic characters of the sign, literally translated, mean:
"Heap--Shrimp--Plenty." ... And finally all the land melts down into
desolations of sea-marsh, whose stillness is seldom broken, except by
the melancholy cry of long-legged birds, and in wild seasons by that
sound which shakes all shores when the weird Musician of the Sea
touches the bass keys of his mighty organ....

II.

Beyond the sea-marshes a curious archipelago lies. If you travel by
steamer to the sea-islands to-day, you are tolerably certain to enter
the Gulf by Grande Pass--skirting Grande Terre, the most familiar
island of all, not so much because of its proximity as because of its
great crumbling fort and its graceful pharos: the stationary
White-Light of Barataria. Otherwise the place is bleakly
uninteresting: a wilderness of wind-swept grasses and sinewy weeds
waving away from a thin beach ever speckled with drift and decaying
things,--worm-riddled timbers, dead porpoises.

Eastward the russet level is broken by the columnar silhouette of the
light house, and again, beyond it, by some puny scrub timber, above
which rises the angular ruddy mass of the old brick fort, whose ditches
swarm with crabs, and whose sluiceways are half choked by obsolete
cannon-shot, now thickly covered with incrustation of oyster shells....
Around all the gray circling of a shark-haunted sea...

Sometimes of autumn evenings there, when the hollow of heaven flames
like the interior of a chalice, and waves and clouds are flying in one
wild rout of broken gold,--you may see the tawny grasses all covered
with something like husks,--wheat-colored husks,--large, flat, and
disposed evenly along the lee-side of each swaying stalk, so as to
present only their edges to the wind. But, if you approach, those pale
husks all break open to display strange splendors of scarlet and
seal-brown, with arabesque mottlings in white and black: they change
into wondrous li