d here. As it reached the Suez side
it made a strong angle under the town's leafy bluffs and their two or
three clambering by-streets, and ran down the rocky margin of the stream
to the new railway station and the old steamboat landing half a mile
below. The bridge was entirely of rugged gray limestone, and spanned the
river's channel and willow-covered sand-bars in seven high, rude arches.
One Christmas dawn during the war a retreating enemy, making ready to
blow up the structure, were a moment too slow, and except for the scars
of a few timely shells dropped into their rear guard, it had come
through those years unscathed. For, just below it, and preferable to it
most of the year, was a broad gravelly ford. Beyond the bridge, on the
Blackland side, the road curved out of view between woods on the right
and meadows on the left. A short way up the river the waters came
dimpling, green and blue in August, but yellow and swirling now, around
the long, bare foot of a wooded island, that lay forever asleep in
midstream, overrun and built upon by the winged Liliputians of the
shores and fields.

The way down to this spot from the Halliday cottage was a grassy street
overarched with low-branching evergreen oaks, and so terraced that the
trees at times robbed the view of even a middle distance. It was by this
way that Fannie and Barbara had come, with gathered skirts, picking
dainty zigzags where, now and then, the way was wet. The spirit of
spring was in the lightness of their draperies' texture and dyes--only a
woman's eye would have noticed that Barbara was in mourning--and their
broken talk was mainly on a plan for the celebration, on the
twenty-second, not of any great and exceptionally truthful patriot's
birthday--Captains Champion and Shotwell were seeing to that--but of
Parson Tombs's and his wife's golden wedding.

When John March saw them, they had just been getting an astonishing
amount of amusement out of the simple fact that Miss Mary Salter and the
younger pastor were the committee on decorations. They were standing
abreast the bridge's parapet, the evening air stirring their garments,
watching the stern-wheeler, Launcelot Halliday, back out from the
landing below into the fretting current for a trip down stream. John had
always approved this companionship; it had tended to sustain his old
illusion that Fannie's extra years need not count between her and him.
But the pleasure of seeing them together now was but