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Propelled by my double paddle, the canoe seemed to fly through the great forest that rose with its tall trunks and weird, moss-draped arms, out of the water. The owls were still hooting. Indeed, the dolorous voice of this bird of darkness sounded through the heavy woods at intervals throughout the day.
Through bend after bend, along willow-lined flats and bluffs crowned with stately, moss-draped live-oaks, we swept on and on; and always I strained my eyes to see, my ears to hear, on ahead some sign of the Belle Helène; always strained my heart for some sign from her. Why, even I looked in the water for some bottle bearing a memory from yon captive maid to me. Captive?
So swollen was the flood that from any deck of a steamboat touching there one might have looked down upon the whole fair still suburb. Widely it hovered in its nest of rose gardens, orange groves, avenues of water-oaks, and towering moss-draped pecans.
On all sides it was enclosed by the moss-draped forest that rose around it, like a grey wall; and in the very centre grew a clump of the same character, that in the distance appeared to be an island. This solitary tarn was far from being silent. On the contrary, it was a scene of stirring life.
"It makes me think of an old, dying, moss-draped white oak standing in the midst of trees of younger and different growth," said Mr. Jocelyn, as he and Mildred scanned the gable-end of the house.
A native instinct in dress, even more of it than her mother had at the same age, and in manners and speech, left only so little rusticity as became itself a charm rather than a blemish, suggested the sugar-cane fields; the orange-grove; the plantation-house, with pillared porch, half-hidden in tall magnolias and laurestines and bushes of red and white camellias higher and wider than arms can reach, and covered with their regal flowers from the ground to their tops; and the bayou front lined with moss-draped live-oaks, their noonday shadows a hundred feet across.
I was almost at its end, where the pines and bushes were scattering and the field of daisies, now in full bloom, began, when I heard a slight sound at my left. I looked in the direction of the sound and saw her. She was standing beneath a gnarled, moss-draped old pine by the bluff edge, looking out over the bay. I stopped, involuntarily. Then I moved on again, as noiselessly as I could.
At one point in the grayest, most shaggy part of the woods, I come suddenly upon a brood of screech owls, full grown, sitting together upon a dry, moss-draped limb, but a few feet from the ground. I pause within four or five yards of them and am looking about me, when my eye lights upon these gray, motionless figures.
A little farther on they are joined as noiselessly by Blind River, and the united waters slip on northward through the dim, colonnaded, watery-floored, green-roofed, blue-vapored, moss-draped wilderness, till in the adjoining parish of Ascension they curve around to the east and issue into the sunny breadth of Lake Maurepas. Thus they make the Bayou des Acadiens.
The Hotel del Monte, or "Hotel of the Forest," one of the most comfortable, best-kept, and moderate-priced hotels of America, lies amid bluegrass lawns and exquisite grounds, in some ways recalling the parks of England's gentry, though including among its noble trees such un-English specimens as the sprawling and moss-draped live-oaks and the curious Monterey pines and cypresses.
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