the hospital, and how easy she made it for the physician to remove the
disability! To her be the credit.




THE STORY OF A DAY


It is really not much, the story; it is only the arrangement of it, as
we would say of our dresses and our drawing-rooms.

It began with the dawn, of course; and the skiff for our voyage,
silvered with dew, waiting in the mist for us, as if it had floated
down in a cloud from heaven to the bayou. When repeated, this sounds
like poor poetry; but that is the way one thinks at day dawn, when the
dew is yet, as it were, upon our brains, and our ideas are still half
dreams, and our waking hearts, alas! as innocent as waking babies
playing with their toes.

Our oars waked the waters of the bayou, as motionless as a sleeping
snake under its misty covert--to continue the poetical language or
thought. The ripples ran frightened and shivering into the rooty
thicknesses of the sedge-grown banks, startling the little birds
bathing there into darting to the nearest, highest rush-top, where,
without losing their hold on their swaying, balancing perches, they
burst into all sorts of incoherent songs, in their excitement to
divert attention from the near-hidden nests: bird mothers are so much
like women mothers!