When my Lord speaks ter his Father,
Far’ you well! Far’ you well!
Says, ‘Father, I’m tired of bearin’,’
Far’ you well! Far’ you well!
‘Tired of bearin’ fer pore sinners,’
Far’ you well! Far’ you well!—”
The Louisiana shore came softly nearer. It was a jewelled and spangled April shore, that sent out sweet breath from flowers without number. Viewed at a little distance it seemed a magic green curtain, rarely embroidered; but when it came nearer its beauty was seen to be shot with the sinister, the ghostly, even, vaguely, with the terrible. Hereabouts rose a great forest through which deep bayous crept to join the river, into which, too, the river ran an inlet or so like a Titan’s finger. The boat with the two negroes and the soldier turned its head downstream, following the loops of the river and the scalloped shore. To-day, indeed, there seemed no proper shore. The shore had turned amphibian. White cypress, red cypress, magnolia, live-oak, in and out between them sucked the dark water. Vines and the wild festoons of the grey moss mirrored themselves within it; herons kept watch by rotting logs over dusk pools swept by the yellow jessamine; the water moccasin slipped beneath perfumed thickets, under a slow, tinted rain of petals. At intervals there opened vast vistas, an endless and mournful world of tall cypress trunks propping a roof that was jealous of the sun. In the river itself were islets, magically fair, Titania bowers, a loveliness of unfolding leaf, delicate and dreamlike enough to make the tears spring. It was past the middle of the day; heat and golden haze in the sun, coolness and cathedral gloom where the enormous woodland threw its shadow.
Now the negroes were silent and now they were talkative, passing abruptly from one mood to the other. Everything in their range of speech was dwelt upon with an equal volubility, interest, and emphasis. A ruined eagle’s nest, a plunging fish-hawk, the slow-sailing buzzards, difficulties with the current, the last duel between gun-boats, the latest dash of a Confederate ram, the breaking levees, a protuberance on a bar of black slime and mud which, on the whole, they held to be a log, until with a sudden dull gleaming it slid into the water and proved to be a turtle—all things received an equal dole of laughter with flashing teeth, of amiable, vivid, childlike discussion. Sometimes they appealed to the white man, and he, friendly minded, at home with them, gave in a word the information or settled with two the dispute. “That’s so! that’s so!” each agreed. “I done see hit that-er-way, too! That’s right, sir! Quarrelling is powerful foolish—jes’ as foolish as gittin’ drunk!”
Any swiftness of work was, in these parts, for the river alone. The boat moved slowly enough, here caught by an eddy, here travelling among snags and bars, doubling with the river, following the wave line of the water-logged shore. The sun’s rays began to fall slantingly. Through the illimitable forest, down between the cypress trunks, came flights of golden arrows.
“We are not far from Cape Jessamine?”