Page:Fantastics and other Fancies.djvu/243

 and enormous, gives the scene a drenched, half-drowned look, as of a land long-immersed, and pushed up again from profundities of stagnant water,—and still dripping with moisture and monstrous algae. . ..

The ranks of the water-oaks become less serried,—the semitropical vegetation less puissant,—the willows and palmettoes and cypresses no longer bar out the horizon-light; and the bayou broadens into a shining, green-rimmed sheet of water, over which our little boat puffs a zigzag course,—feeling her way cautiously,—to enter a long chain of lakelets and lakes, all bayou-linked together. Sparser and lower becomes the foliage-line, lower also the banks;—the water-tints brighten bluely; the heavy and almost acrid odors of the swamp pass away. So thin the land is that from the little steamer's deck, as from a great altitude, the eye can range over immense distances. These are the skirts of the continent, trending in multitudinous tatters southward to the sea;—and the practiced gaze of the geologist can discern the history of prodigious alluvial formation, the slow creation of future prairie lands, in those long grassy tongues,—those