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He taught me to walk, and he taught me to ride, and shooting, and fishing, and such like country diversions; and strange to say, he taught me to swim, the way they learn in my mother's country, with a bundle of bull-rushes for the old man couldn't swim a stroke himself, or he might be here now, alive and hearty, please GOD." "Were there only you and he in the hooker?" "That's all.
I saw it, coming up, but I thought it was only a patch of bull-rushes. We can't get a canoe through, anyway. Let's go ashore and have a look at the country." They paddled in and scrambled up the bank.
There was some twenty of us, that lay close couched down among the reeds and bull-rushes that grew in the moat that goes round the city.
And moreover there there are some of them that frequent Mr. Baxter's Puritanical Holding-forth, whose heads will immediately, in imitation of their Patron, hang like Bull-rushes; for they are taught to mourn with the sorrowfull, and to rejoice with the joifull. But it is now a time to be merry, and throw away masks and vizards; for all is done under the Rose, and among good acquaintance.
The child wuz wedged in by the throng of folks and couldn't stir, and they wuz all engrossed in their own business which wuz pressin', and very important, a buyin' plates, and plaks, with bull-rushes, and cranes, and storks on 'em, so naturelly, they didn't mind what wuz a goin' on round 'em. And down it come! And there it wuz put down in the paper, "A mysterious dispensation of Providence."
We found also a little silk grasse and a little Tobacco seed with some other seeds which wee knew not. Without was sundry bundles of Flags and Sedge, Bull-rushes and other stuffe to make matts. There was thrust into a hollow tree two or three pieces of venison, but we thought it fitter for the Dogs than for us.
The bull-rushes and long water-grass was considerable thick there, and once or twice I thought in my soul I should have to let go my hold of the child, and leave him to save my own life, my feet got so tangled in it; but I stuck to it like a good fellow, and worked my passage out with the youngster.
Their fire is in the middle of this conical hut, and they sleep on the ground strewed with rushes, around the fire. The men go naked, but the women wear a kind of petticoat of bull-rushes, dressed in the manner of hemp, which is fastened round their waists, and reaches down to their hips; having likewise a deer-skin on their shoulders.
Down by the flats, where the tiny creek widened to a miniature swamp and emptied its placid waters into the main stream, the red-wing blackbirds sounded their strange cry among the cat-tails and the bull-rushes; the frogs croaked in ceaseless and reverberant chorus; the catfish were ever hungry after dark, and the night was broken by the glare of torches along the little bridge or in a group of boats where fisher-lads kept close watch upon their corks.
The surface of the brook where she had gone down remained unruffled. Then, clear across on the other side, one watching sharply might have seen a child's head appear out of the pool, at the edge of a clump of bull-rushes; might have seen her emerge half out of water, and hide herself from view of anyone on the opposite shore. She had swum the entire width of the pool under water.
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