peculiar purple haze. Eastward the railroad's long causeway and
telegraph-poles narrowed on the view through its wide axe-hewn lane in
the overtowering swamp. New Orleans, sixty miles or more away, was in
that direction. Westward, rails, causeway, and telegraph, tapered away
again across the illimitable hidden quicksands of the "trembling
prairie" till the green disguise of reeds and rushes closed in upon
the attenuated line, and only a small notch in a far strip of woods
showed where it still led on toward Texas. Behind the Acadian the
smoke of woman's early industry began to curl from two or three low
chimneys.

But his eye lingered in the north. He stood with his dog curled at his
feet beside a bunch of egrets,--killed for their plumage,--the butt of
his long fowling-piece resting on the platform, and the arm half
outstretched whose hand grasped the barrels near the muzzle. The hand,
toil-hardened and weather-browned, showed, withal, antiquity of race.
His feet were in rough muddy brogans, but even so they were smallish
and shapely. His garments were coarse, but there were no tatters
anywhere. He wore a wide Campeachy hat. His brown hair was too long,
but it was fine. His eyes, too, were brown, and, between brief moments
of alertness, sedate. Sun and wind had darkened his face, and his pale
brown beard curled meagre and untrimmed on a cheek and chin that in
forty years had never felt a razor.

Some miles away in the direction in which he was looking, the
broadening sunlight had struck and brightened the single red lug-sail
of a boat whose unseen hull, for all the eye could see, was coming
across the green land on a dry keel. But the bayou, hidden in the tall
rushes, was its highway; for suddenly the canvas was black as it
turned its shady side, and soon was red again as another change of
direction caught the sunbeams upon its tense width and showed that,
with much more wind out there than it would find by and by in here
under the lee of the swamp, it was following the unseen meanderings of
the stream. Presently it reached a more open space where a stretch of
the water lay shining in the distant view. Here the boat itself came
into sight, showed its bunch of some half-dozen passengers for a
minute or two, and vanished again, leaving only its slanting red sail
skimming nautilus-like over the vast breezy expanse.

Yet more than two hours later the boat's one blue-shirted, barefoot
Sicilian sailor in red worsted cap