"It is rather hard, the way the thing doubles up on you," says Tom. "The real fall, right side up, is bad enough; but when it comes to the reflection of it, standing on its head in the lagoon, I should lie right down myself. I wouldn't pull another pound."
("Lay down," he said; but I thought you wouldn't stand it. Tom would never spoil a cherished bit of dialect because of shocking anybody with his grammar.)
Kitty throws herself back in the dry salt-grass with which the whole of our little peninsula is bedded. The willows and brakes are our curtains, through which the rising moon looks in at us, and the setting sun; the sun rises long before we see him, above the dark-blue mountains beyond the shore.
"Won't somebody repeat
'There is sweet music here that softlier lies?'"
Kitty asks, letting her eyelashes fall on her sun-flushed cheeks. Her face, as I saw it, sitting behind her in the grass, was so pretty—upside down like the reflection of the waterfall, its colors all the more wonderfully blended.
We did not all speak at once. Then Harshaw said, to break the silence, "I will read it to you, if you don't mind."
"Oh, have you the book?" Kitty asked in surprise.
He went to his tent and returned with a book, and sitting on the grass where she could hear but could not see him, he began. I trembled for him; but before he had got to the second stanza I was relieved: he could read aloud.
"Now there is a man one could live on a Snake River ranch with," I felt like saying to Kitty. Not that I am sure that I want her to.