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Owing to his tastes and habits he had been dubbed Professor by his friends. "Ach! Van der Kemp," he exclaimed, while his coal-black eyes glittered as they shook hands, "vat a booterfly I saw to-day! It beat all creation! The vay it flew oh! But, excuse me v'ere did you come from, and vy do you come? An' who is your frond?"
Bushes with twisted and fantastic arms, growing, they or their ancestors, from time immemorial in the clefts of the rock, reach towards the light, and the elfish hart's-tongue fern, itself half in darkness, points down with frond that never moves in that eternal stillness which all the winds of heaven pass over, to a thicker darkness whence comes the everlasting wail and groan of hidden water.
Owing to his tastes and habits he had been dubbed Professor by his friends. "Ach! Van der Kemp," he exclaimed, while his coal-black eyes glittered as they shook hands, "vat a bootterfly I saw to-day! It beat all creation! The vay it flew oh! But, excuse me v'ere did you come from, and vy do you come? An' who is your frond?"
"Ah! mein frond! mine brodder!" he exclaimed, in fairly idiomatic English, but with a broken pronunciation that was a mixture of Dutch, American, and Malay. His language therefore, like himself, was nondescript.
Suddenly, however, I thought I detected a slight movement in a bracken frond beside the furze. It was not repeated, and I had concluded that it signified nothing, when, to my amazement, I caught sight of a second hare squatting in the middle of the path near the bracken.
"Ve vill hont an' shot togezzer, mine frond," he said, on making this discovery, "ant I vill show you v'ere de best booterflies are to be fount Oh! sooch a von as I saw to but, excuse me, Van der Kemp. Vy you come here joost now?" "To save you" said the hermit, with a scintillation of his half-pitiful smile.
The tail wriggled for a few seconds, and the head gaped once or twice, as if in mild surprise at so sudden a finale. "Zat is strainch very strainch," slowly remarked the professor, as, still seated on the ground, he solemnly noted these facts. "Not so very strange, after all," said Van der Kemp; "I've seen the head of many a bigger snake cut off at one blow." "Mine frond, you mistake me.
She floated past a couple of times close to the ceiling: her tiny face was laughing; laughing also were her huge, black, luminous eyes. The merry playfulness of her capricious flight shivered their diamond rays. She held in her hand a long frond of a steppe flower "Imperial sceptre" the Russian folk call it; and it does, indeed, resemble a sceptre.
Needing a lamp for his chamber he entered a shop where such things were sold, and examined those that the merchant offered to him. Presently he perceived one of the strange design of two palms with intertwining trunks and feathery heads nodding apart, having a lamp hanging by a little chain from the topmost frond of each of them.
All this and far more he showed her with a touch so light as not to shake the morning dew from bell or leaf or frond, and with a voice so soft and full of music as to fill our hearts with the canyon's mingling sounds, and, as I looked upon her face, I said to myself: "Dear old Pilot! for this I shall always love you well."
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