out and walked
forth side by side. They are going that way still, only--with hands
joined.

AU LARGE.

CHAPTER I.

THE POT-HUNTER.

The sun was just rising, as a man stepped from his slender dug-out and
drew half its length out upon the oozy bank of a pretty bayou. Before
him, as he turned away from the water, a small gray railway-platform
and frame station-house, drowsing on long legs in the mud and water,
were still veiled in the translucent shade of the deep cypress swamp,
whose long moss drapings almost overhung them on the side next the
brightening dawn. The solemn gray festoons did overhang the farthest
two or three of a few flimsy wooden houses and a saw-mill with its
lumber, logs, and sawdust, its cold furnace and idle engine.

As with gun and game this man mounted by a short, rude ladder to
firmer footing on the platform, a negro, who sat fishing for his
breakfast on the bank a few yards up the stream, where it bent from
the north and west, slowly lifted his eyes, noted that the other was a
white man, an Acadian, and brought his gaze back again to hook and
line.

He had made out these facts by the man's shape and dress, for the
face was in shade. The day, I say, was still in its genesis. The
waters that slid so languidly between the two silent men as not to
crook one line of the station-house's image inverted in their clear
dark depths, had not yet caught a beam upon their whitest water-lily,
nor yet upon their tallest bulrush; but the tops of the giant
cypresses were green and luminous, and as the Acadian glanced abroad
westward, in the open sky far out over the vast marshy breadths of the
"shaking prairie,"[5] two still clouds, whose under surfaces were yet
dusky and pink, sparkled on their sunward edges like a frosted fleece.
You could not have told whether the Acadian saw the black man or not.
His dog, soiled and wet, stood beside his knee, pricked his ears for a
moment at sight of the negro, and then dropped them.

[5] The "shaking prairie," "trembling prairie," or
_prairie tremblante_, is low, level, treeless delta
land, having a top soil of vegetable mould overlying
immense beds of quicksand.

It was September. The comfortable air could only near by be seen to
stir the tops of the high reeds whose crowding myriads stretched away
south, west, and north, an open sea of green, its immense distances
relieved here and there by strips of swamp forest tinged with their