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To regain the highroad we had turned into a northerly fork, and were in as lovely a spot as we had seen all day. Before us and close on our right were the dense woods of magnolia, water-oak, tupelo and a hundred other affluent things that towered and spread or clambered and hung. On the left lay the old field, tawny with bending sedge and teeming with the yellow rays of the sun's last hour.
Just at the lowest point in the valley I stopped to listen to a song which I did not recognize, but which, by and by, I settled upon as probably the work of a freakish prairie warbler. At that moment, as if to confirm my conjecture, which in the retrospect becomes almost ridiculous, a prairie warbler hopped into sight on an outer twig of the water-oak out of which the music had proceeded.
At length the trail was ended, and the open road reached. "Now," said Uncle Jack, "we are here at last. This is the road that leads to Sheltonville, the only place that lies in your way to the Queen City. Keep it straight, chile, an' mebbe you'll reach thar at last; mebbe not; I don't know. Here, let's rest a minit under this water-oak.
The tree was a huge moss-hung water-oak, evidently too large to be chopped down, as all the 'coon trees of Solon's stories had been. So Winn offered to climb it and shake out the 'coon. As yet they had not discovered the animal, but Bim was so confident of its presence that they took his word for it.
And the same is true of the loggerhead shrikes, a pair of which had built a nest in a small water-oak at the edge of the sidewalk, on a street corner, just beyond the reach of passers-by. In the roadside trees all freshly planted, like the city were myrtle warblers, prairie warblers, and blue yellowbacks, the two latter in song.
Not a breath of air ruffled the surface of the lagoon, or stirred the boughs of the surrounding trees, among which were cypresses, live-oak, water-oak, the cabbage-palm, and many others, festooned with wreaths of the gorgeous trumpet-flower of crimson hue, wild-vines, and parasites innumerable; while a short way off I could distinguish a meadow of tall grass or reeds a dozen feet in height at least.
The sky was so wonderful and the river so winding and lovely and the air so delicious that yesterdays did not seem important and only to-day counted; and it was when we were sitting under a beautiful big water-oak that Whythe began to be terribly sentimental and say things that would have been more suitable for moonlight and shadows and things of that sort.
Pines, willows, cotton-wood, two kinds of hickory, water-oak, live-oak, sweet-gum, magnolia, the red and white bay-tree, a few red cedars, and haw-bushes, with many species not known to me, made up a rich wall of verdure on either side, as I sped along with a light heart to Columbus, where my compagnons de voyage were to meet me. Wood-ducks and egrets, in small flocks, inhabited the forest.
There was no sound abroad except the hooting of an old owl in the top of a water-oak, and the everlasting voice of the sea, that was not uplifted at that soft hour. It broke like a mournful lullaby upon the night. The tears came so fast to Mrs. Pontellier's eyes that the damp sleeve of her peignoir no longer served to dry them.
Men build dikes; but the besieging tides bring up their battering-rams whole forests of drift huge trunks of water-oak and weighty cypress. Forever the yellow Mississippi strives to build; forever the sea struggles to destroy; and amid their eternal strife the islands and the promontories change shape, more slowly, but not less fantastically, than the clouds of heaven.
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