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Updated: June 13, 2025
They were alongside the New Madrid wharf now, and a certain young man who had been impatiently watching The Naiad's lights ever since they became visible crossed the gang-plank with a bound. "Betty why in the name of goodness did you ever, choose this tub? everything on the river has passed it!" said the newcomer. Betty started up with a little cry of surprise and pleasure. "Charley!"
I continued to do my best to cheer him up by talking to him of my home, and how he might find his relations and friends, and then I bethought me that I would sing a song. I don't suppose that many people have sung under such circumstances, but I managed to strike up a stave, one of those with which I had been accustomed to amuse my messmates in the Naiad's forecastle.
It's a place for being quite independent of neighbours, free as air. 'Oh! bravo! 'And Fredi will have her horse, and mama her pony-carriage; and Fredi can have a swim every Summer morning. 'A swim? Her note was dubious. 'A river? 'A good long stretch fairish, fairish. Bit of a lake; bathing-shed; the Naiad's bower: pretty water to see. 'Ah. And has the house a name? 'Lakelands.
I know every bend and curve: the sharp turn where the water runs under the roots of the old hemlock-tree; the snaky glen, where the alders stretch their arms far out across the stream; the meadow reach, where the trout are fat and silvery, and will only rise about sunrise or sundown, unless the day is cloudy; the Naiad's Elbow, where the brook rounds itself, smooth and dimpled, to embrace a cluster of pink laurel-bushes.
You find seductive fancies in the wreathing mists, the light embroidered veils which Nature dons like a coy maiden, in this atmosphere where she perfumes for her spousals the greenery of her tresses. You seek the naiad's form amid the gauzy vapors, and to your thinking my ears should listen only to the virile voice of the Torrent."
But see! from out the deep-blue ocean Fair Venus springs with gentle motion The graceful Naiad's smiling band Conveys her to the gladdened strand, A May-like, youthful, magic power Entwines, like morning's twilight hour, Around that form of godlike birth, The charms of air, sea, heaven, and earth.
With a supreme effort some mariners would reach the board and eagerly scan the blue, transparent deep, hoping to see a naiad's pink shoulder flash in the hollow of an azure wave, or a drunken gay centaur dash along and in frenzy splash the wave with his hoof. But the sea was like a wilderness, and the deep was dumb and deserted.
"If you want to know all about it, you young swabber, I may tell you I stood on the Naiad's gun-deck with better folk than you are ever likely to come across" he stamped his foot here as if he had the deck under him "when, with one broadside from the Dictator, the three masts and bowsprit were shot away, and the main deck came crashing down upon the lower;" the last sentence was taken from 'Exploits of Danish and Norwegian Naval Heroes, and the old man was as proud of these lines as he would have been of a medal.
It's a place for being quite independent of neighbours, free as air. 'Oh! bravo! 'And Fredi will have her horse, and mama her pony-carriage; and Fredi can have a swim every Summer morning. 'A swim? Her note was dubious. 'A river? 'A good long stretch fairish, fairish. Bit of a lake; bathing-shed; the Naiad's bower: pretty water to see. 'Ah. And has the house a name? 'Lakelands.
"If there were such an urn as that," he said, pointing to the naiad's, "ever renewing the water inside it without pipe or spring, there would be what we call a miracle, because, unable to follow the appearance farther back, we should cease thought, and wonder only in the presence of the making God.
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