from the saucy north wind. In time the low land, and then the lighthouse,
sank and vanished behind them; on the left the sun went down in the purple
black swamps of Manchac; the intervening waters turned crimson and bronze
under the fairer changes of the sky, while in front of them Fort Pike
Light began to glimmer through an opal haze, and by and by to draw near.
It passed. From a large inbound schooner gliding by in the twilight, came
in friendly recognition, the drone of a conch-shell, the last happy
salutation Sweetheart was ever to receive. Then the evening star silvered
their wake through the deep Rigolets, and the rising moon met them, her
and her lover, in Lake Borgne, passing the dark pines of Round Island, and
hurrying on toward the white sand-keys of the Gulf.

The night was well advanced as they neared the pine-crested dunes of Cat
Island, in whose lee a more cautious sailor would have dropped anchor till
the morning. But to this pair every mile of these fickle waters, channel
and mud-lump, snug lagoon, open sea and hidden bar, each and all, were
known as the woods are known to a hunter, and, as he drew her hand closer
to his side, she turned across the track of the moon and bounded into the
wide south. A maze of marsh islands--huddling along that narrow, half-
drowned mainland of cypress swamp and trembling prairie which follows the
Mississippi out to sea--slept, leagues away, below the western waters. In
the east lay but one slender boundary between the voyager and the
shoreless deep, and this was so near that from its farther edge came now
and again its admonishing murmur, the surf-thunder of the open Gulf
rolling forever down the prone but unshaken battle-front of the sandy
Chandeleurs.



IV