majestic athletic yankees

For many a day I had not seen such charms of feminine attire, and yet I was not charmed. Every item of her fragrant drapery was from the world's open market, hence flagrantly un-Confederate, unpatriotic, reprehensible. Otherwise it might not have seemed to me that her thin nostrils had got their passionateness lately.

Westward likewise we soon were bickering. The morning sun shone high; the thin, hot dust blew out over the blackened ground of some forest "burn" or through the worm fence of some field where a gang of slave men and women might be ploughing or hoeing between the green rows of young cotton or corn. The level stretches were many, the slopes gradual, and to those sweet city-bird ladies everything was new and delightful; a log cabin!--with clay chimney on the outside!--a well and its well-sweep!--another cabin with its gourd-vines! They knew that blessed alchemy which turns all things into the poetry of the moment. Sweet they would have been anywhere to any eye or mind; but I was a homeless trooper lad, and sweeter to the soldier boy than water on the battlefield are short hours with ladies who love him for his banner and his rags.

These four were charmed with an old field given up to sedge, its deep rain-gullies as red as gaping wounds, its dead trees in tatters of long gray moss. Estelle became a student of flowers, Cécile of birds, Camille of trees. All my explanations were alike enchantingly strange. To their minds it had never occurred that the land sloped the same way the water ran! When told that these woods abounded in deer and wild turkey they began to look out for them at every new turn of the road. And the turns came fast. Happy miles, happy leagues; each hour was of a mellower sweetness than the last; they seemed to ripen in the sun. The only drawback was my shame of a sentimental situation, but once or twice I longed to turn the whole equipage into the woods--or the ditch. As, for instance, when three pine-woods cavalrymen had no sooner got by us than they set up that ribald old camp-song,

So there came a silence, and then a gay laugh as three of us at once asked if he had ever heard of Lieutenant Durand. "Durand!" he cried, and looked squarely around at me. I lifted the cocked revolver, but he kept his fine eyes on mine and I rubbed my ear with my wrist. "What?" he said, "an elegant, Creole-seeming young fellow, very handsome? Why, that fellow saved my life this very afternoon."

"Such as which?" asked the Yankee, with a twinkle. "There were two kinds."

"Don't you know?" I asked.

What do you say?--Yes, she might have spoken more wisely. Yet always there vibrated in her voice a wealth of thought, now bitter, now sweet, and often both at once, and a splendor of emotions, beyond the scope of all ordinary natures. How far beyond my own scope they were, even with my passions at flood-tide and turbid as a back-street overflow, I failed to ponder while I passed around the paling fence alone.

"Yes," he responded, "but not she! Her life is still hers; she will neither give it away nor throw it away. She wants it, and she wants it whole."

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