“ ‘Ye banks and bray-aas of bon-onny Doo-oon,’ ” chanted Iris, who, fresh as a rose-bud with the dew on it, stood at the bow, with the wind blowing her dark wavy hair back from her lovely face; as for her hat, it had long ago found itself discarded and tied to the railing for safe-keeping.
“The fresh-water shell heaps of the St. Johns River, East Florida,” began the Professor, “should be—should be somewhere about here.” He peered around, but could see nothing with his near-sighted eyes.
“Iris,” called Aunt Diana through the closed blinds of her state-room, “pray put on your hat. Miss Sharp! Where is Miss Sharp?”
“Here,” answered the governess, emerging reluctantly from the cabin, muffled in a brown veil. Sunrise enthusiasm came hard to her; she knew that hers was not the beauty that shines at dawn, and she had a great longing for her matutinal coffee. Miss Sharp’s eyes were faintly blue, she had the smallest quantity of the blondest hair disposed in two ringlets on each side of her face, a shadowy little figure, indistinct features, and a complexion that turned aguish on the slightest provocation. Nevertheless, equal to the emergency, she immediately superintended the tying down of Iris’s little round hat, and then, with her heelless prunella gaiters fully revealed by the strong wind, and her lisle-threaded hands struggling to repress the fluttering veil, she stood prepared to do her duty by the fresh-water shell heaps or any other geological formation. John Hoffman was walking up and down smoking a Bohemian-looking pipe. “There is only one item, Miss St. John, in all the twenty-five miles between the mouth of the river and Jacksonville,” he said, pausing a moment near the bench where Sara and I sat as usual together. “That headland opposite is St. Johns Bluff, the site of old Fort Caroline, where, in 1564, a colony of French Huguenots established themselves, and one year later were massacred, men, women, and children, by the cut-throat Menendez, who took the trouble to justify his deed by an inscription hung up over the bodies of his victims, ‘No por Franceses, sino por Luteranos’—‘Not as Frenchmen, but as Lutherans.’ It is a comfort to the unregenerate mind to know that three years later a Frenchman sailed over and took his turn at a massacre, politely putting up a second inscription, ‘Not as Spaniards, but as traitors, thieves, and murderers.’ ”
SHOOTING ALLIGATORS ON THE ST. JOHNS.
“That was certainly poetic justice,” I said. “Who would imagine that such a drama had been enacted on that innocent hillside? What terrible days they were!”
“Terrible, perhaps, but at least far more earnest as well as more picturesque than our commonplace era,” said Sara, with her indifferent air. She was generally either indifferent or defiant, and Aunt Diana regarded her with disfavor as “a young person who wrote for the magazines.” Sara was twenty-eight years old, a woman with pale cheeks, weary eyes, a slight frown on her forehead, clear-cut features, and a quantity of pale golden hair drawn rigidly back and braided close around the head with small regard for fashion’s changes. I had met her in a city boarding-house, and, liking her in spite of herself, we grew into friendship; and although her proud independence would accept nothing from me save liking, I was sometimes able to persuade her into a journey, which she always enjoyed notwithstanding the inevitable descriptive article which she declared lurked behind every bush and waved a banner of proof-sheets at her from every sunshiny hill.
