Does he sup on
them, or are they only the cups and saucers of his vegeto-aquarian
_menage_? Blue and yellow all,--the sky and the sedge-rows, the calm
lake and the canoe, the plashing basswood-leaves and the oval, azure
shells.
Also Marance, the _voyageur's_ buxom young daughter, who came with us,
today, commissioned to cull herbs of wondrous properties among the
vine-tangled thickets of the islands. Blue and yellow. Eyes blue as
the azure shells; hair flashing out golden gleams, like that of
Pyrrha, when she braided hers so featly for the coming of some
ambrosial boy.
"I must marry you, Marance," said I, jocularly, to the damsel, as I
jumped her out of the canoe,--"I shall marry you when we get back."
It is good to live in a marsh. No fast boarding-house women there,
lurking for the unwary; no breaches of promise; "no nothing" in the
old-man-trap line. Abjure fast boarding-houses, you silly old
bachelors, and go to grass in a marsh!
Marance laughed merrily, as she tripped away; then, turning, she
said,--
"But what if I never get back? I may lose myself in these lonely
places, and never be heard of again."
"Oh, in that case," replied I, hard driven for a compliment, "in that
case, I must wait until Gilette"--a younger sister--"grows up. She
will be exactly like you: I must only wait for Gilette."
"You remind me of Pete Walker," said the old man, as we shot away up
the channel, our canoe ripping up the matted surface like the cue of a
novice, when he runs a fatal reef along the sere and yellow cloth of
some billiard-table erewhile in verdure clad.
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