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On it were oases of fire-blackened palmettos, little ponds, palmetto scrub and bits of soggy meadow, in which they often sank to their knees, as they plodded across them. There were tracks of wild animals in the meadows and regular trails of alligators between the ponds. Billy stopped beside one of the ponds and grunted, as he had been taught by Johnny, until a little 'gator showed his head.
Whether he 'wept crocodile tears' besides, the doctor could not discover; but it was at least clear, that if swans sing before they die, alligators do so likewise: for the poor thing was dead next morning. It was time, after this, to stow the pets warm between decks, and as near the galley-fires as they could be put.
The loneliness of the place was dreadful, its waste and desolation were appalling. And yet it lived with a life of its own. Wild fowl flew in wedges from the sea to feed in its recesses, alligators and hippopotami splashed in the waters, bitterns boomed among the rushes, and from every pool and quagmire came the croaking of a thousand frogs.
Then another night, and there was the pageant of Florida: palmettos, and other trees of which one had seen pictures in the geography books; stretches of vine-tangled swamps, where one looked for alligators; orange-groves in blossom, and gardens full of flowers beyond imagining.
The geological formation is a concrete of shells of enormous thickness, which has hardened to the only semblance of rock which the coast affords, and the low dunes have shut off from the Atlantic long lagoons which swarm with life, marine and aquatic creatures occurring in numberless species and orders; alligators lie in wait for their prey, and schools of porpoises come in by the inlets in pursuit of other schools of fat mullet which swarm in the water.
Then there's the two thousand francs a month, and not a penny out of pocket, and there's the Congo, and the guggly-wuggly alligators, and the great big hairy apes, and the feel of a gun in one's hand again. Oh, my!" "All the same, it's funny," he went on, as he drew near the Boulevard St. Michel. "When Thénard spoke of Berselius there was something more than absence of friendship in his tone.
"You will not come easily to the back of them. Farewell, my children, and if you dare to fail, pray that you may die rather than look upon my face again." "Ou! We have seen it once, is that not enough?" answered the spokesman, looking at Otter's huge nose with wonder not untouched by fear. Two minutes later the four men were swimming swiftly down the dike, taking their chance of the alligators.
The horses were tethered to a tree, the food got out, and we sat down on a pebbly beach after a bathe in a deep pool, so clear that it looked but four feet deep, though the bathers soon found it to be eight and more. A few dark logs, as usual, were lodged at the bottom, looking suspiciously like alligators or boa-constrictors.
It seemed incredible to him that the queen of her sex, a girl who had chatted in terms of equality with African head-hunters and who swatted alligators as though they were flies, could ever lower herself to care for a man who looked like the "after-taking" advertisement of a patent food.
'No, but I thought he had every time I heard a board creak. I didn't dare close my eyes for a minute. Have you ever stayed awake all night, waiting for the goblins that get you if you don't watch out? Well, take it from me it's no picnic. His face split in another mammoth yawn. He threw his heart into it, as if life held no other tasks for him. Only in alligators have I ever seen its equal.
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