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The floor, from habitual scrubbing with the common weed which politeness has to call Helenium autumnale, was stained a bright, clean yellow. On it were, here and there in places, white mats woven of bleached palmetto-leaf.
In civilisation he would, judging from his mechanical talent, perhaps have been an engineer, building bridges and ships, instead of palmetto-leaf baskets and cane houses who knows if he would have been happier? The heat of midday had passed, when, with the basket hanging over his shoulder on a piece of cane, he started for the woods, Emmeline following.
Her wrinkled face and care-worn look tell a different tale from the pompous self-content of the merchant by her side, who drives as hard a bargain as she does. In his hand he carries a palmetto-leaf basket, already half full, as with slippered feet he carefully picks his way among puddles and garbage.
Wherever the lady's steps turned or it is as correct to say wherever the proud tread of Palmyre turned the features of bachelor's-hall disappeared; guns, dogs, oars, saddles, nets, went their way into proper banishment, and the broad halls and lofty chambers the floors now muffled with mats of palmetto-leaf no longer re-echoed the tread of a lonely master, but breathed a redolence of flowers and a rippling murmur of well-contented song.
He lighted the fire, and blew it into a flame with a palmetto-leaf, and then he sat down awhile, very sick at heart; then he got up and did the cooking, sighing all the time; and, just when he was beginning to wonder why Helen was so long lighting eight bundles of straw, she came in, looking pale. "Is it all right?" said he. "Go and look," said she. "No, let us have our supper first."
Just the same he could see no other room connected with the stone building it was always possible, however, that there might be another shack perhaps a crude palmetto-leaf hut, such as the poor whites in the backwoods lived in, somewhere not far away that served them for a shelter when it rained or a bustling Norther came howling down from the regions of snow and ice and zero temperatures.
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