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went to the upper deck, Rectus as willing as anybody to see the fun.

Corny seated herself on a little stool near the yellow-legged party, the men of which had put down their guns for a time. Rectus and I sat on the forward railing, near her. Directly she cleared her throat, and then, after looking about her on each side, said to me, in very distinct tones:

"Voy-ezz vows cett hommy ett ses ducks femmys seelah?"[B]

I came near roaring out laughing, but I managed to keep my face straight, and said: "Oui."

"Well, then,—I mean Bean donk lah peetit femmy nest pah lah femmy due hommy. Lah oter femmy este sah femmy."[C]

[110]

"VOY-EZZ VOWS CETT HOMMY ETT SES DUCKS FEMMYS SEELAH?" "VOY-EZZ VOWS CETT HOMMY ETT SES DUCKS FEMMYS SEELAH?"

At this, there was no holding in any longer. I burst out laughing, so that I came near falling off the railing; Rectus laughed because I did; the gentleman with the wife and the young lady laughed madly, and Mr. Chipperton, who came out of the saloon on hearing the uproar, laughed quite cheerfully, and asked what it was all about. But Corny didn't laugh. She turned around short to see what effect her speech had had on the yellow-legged party. It had a good[111] deal of effect. They reddened and looked at us. Then they drew their chairs closer together, and turned their backs to us. What they thought, we never knew; but Corny declared to me afterward that they talked no more French,—at least when she was about.

The gentleman who had been the subject of Corny's French discourse called her over to him, and the four had a gay talk together. I heard Corny tell them that she never could pronounce French in the French way. She pronounced it just as it was spelt, and her father said that ought to be the rule with every language. She had never had a regular teacher; but if people laughed so much at the way she talked, perhaps her father ought to get her one.

I liked Corny better the more I knew of her. It was easy to see that she had taught herself all that she knew. Her mother held her back a good deal, no doubt; but her father seemed more like a boy-companion than anything else, and if Corny hadn't been a very smart girl, she would have been a pretty bad kind of a girl by this time. But she wasn't anything of the sort, although she did do and say everything that came into her head to say or do. Rectus did not agree with me about Corny. He didn't like her.

When it grew dark, I thought we should stop somewhere for the night, for it was hard enough for the boat to twist and squeeze herself along the river in broad daylight. She bumped against big trees that stood on the edge of the stream, and swashed through bushes that stuck out too far from the banks; but she[112] was built for bumping and scratching, and didn't mind it. Sometimes she would turn around a corner and make a short cut through a whole plantation of lily-pads and spatterdocks,—or things like them,—and she would scrape over a sunken log as easily as a wagon-wheel rolls over a stone. She drew only two feet of water, and was flat-bottomed. When she made a very short turn, the men had to push her stern around with poles. Indeed, there was a man with a pole at the bow a good deal of the time, and sometimes he had more pushing off to do than he could manage by himself.

When Mr. Chipperton saw what tight places we had to squeeze through, he admitted that it was quite proper not to try to bring the big steam-boats up here.

But the boat didn't stop. She kept right on. She had to go a hundred and forty miles up that narrow river, and if she made the whole trip from Pilatka and back in two days, she had no time to lose. So, when it was dark, a big iron box was set up on top of the pilot-house, and a fire was built in it of pine-knots and bits of fat pine. This blazed finely, and lighted up the river and the trees on each side, and sometimes threw out such a light that we could see quite a distance ahead. Everybody came out to see the wonderful sight. It was more like fairy-land than ever. When the fire died down a little, the distant scenery seemed to fade away and become indistinct and shadowy, and the great trees stood up like their own ghosts all around us; and then, when fresh knots were thrown in, the fire would blaze up, and the whole[113] scene would be lighted up again, and every tree and bush, and almost every leaf, along the water's edge would be tipped with light, while everything was reflected in the smooth, glittering water.

Rectus and I could hardly go in to supper, and we got through the meal in short order. We staid out on deck until after eleven o'clock, and Corny staid with us a good part of the time. At last, her father came down after her, for they were all going to bed.

"This is a grand sight," said Mr. Chipperton. "I never saw anything to equal it in any transformation scene at a theatre. Some of our theatre people ought to come down here and study it up, so as to get up something of the kind for exhibition in the cities."

Just before we went into bed, our steam-whistle began to sound, and away off in the depths of the forest we could hear every now and then another whistle. The captain told us that there was a boat coming down the river, and that she would soon pass us. The river did not look wide enough for two boats; but when the other whistle sounded as if it were quite near, we ran our boat close into shore among the spatterdocks, in a little cove, and waited there, leaving the channel for the other boat.

Directly, it came around a curve just ahead of us, and truly it was a splendid sight. The lower part of the boat was all lighted up, and the fire was blazing away grandly in its iron box, high up in the air.

To see such a glowing, sparkling apparition as this come sailing out of the depths of the dark forest, was[114] grand! Rectus said he felt like bursting into poetry; but he didn't. He wasn't much on rhymes. He had opportunity enough, though, to get up a pretty good-sized poem, for we were kept awake a long time after we went to bed by the boughs of the trees on shore scratching and tapping against the outside of our state-room.

When we went out on deck the next morning, the first person we saw was Corny, holding on to the flag-staff at the bow and looking over the edge of the deck into the water.

"What are you looking at?" said I, as we went up to her.

"See there!" she cried. "See that turtle! And those two fishes! Look! look!"

We didn't need to be told twice to look. The water was just as clear as crystal, and you could see the bottom everywhere, even in the deepest places, with the great rocks covered with some glittering green substance that looked like emerald slabs, and the fish and turtles swimming about as if they thought there was no one looking at them.

I couldn't understand how the water had become so clear; but I was told that we had left the river proper and were now in a stream that flowed from Silver Spring, which was the end of our voyage into the cypress woods. The water in the spring and in this stream was almost transparent,—very different from the regular water of the river.

About ten o'clock, we reached Silver Spring, which is like a little lake, with some houses on the bank.[115] We made fast at a wharf, and, as we were to stop here some hours, everybody got ready to go ashore.

Corny was the first one ready. Her mother thought she ought not to go, but her father said there was no harm in it.

"If she does," said Mrs. Chipperton, "she'll get herself into some sort of a predicament before she comes back."

I found that in such a case as this Mrs. Chipperton was generally right.[116]

FOOTNOTES:

[B] "Voyez-vous cet homme et ces deux femmes celà?"—Do you see that man and those two women there?

[C] "Bien donc, la petite femme n'est pas la femme du homme. La autre femme est sa femme."—Well, then, the little woman is not the wife of the man. The other woman is his wife. [Of course, the French in this, and the preceding, foot-note is Corny's.—The Author.]

CHAPTER IX. THE THREE GRAY BEANS.

Corny went ashore, but she did not stay there three minutes. From the edge of the wharf we could see that Silver Spring was better worth looking at than anything we should be likely to see on shore. The little lake seemed deeper than a three-story house, and yet, even from where we stood, we could see down to the very bottom.

There were two boys with row-boats at the wharf. We hired one of the boats right off, and Corny gave me such a look, that I told her to get in. After she was in the boat, she asked her mother, who was standing on the deck of the steam-boat, if she might go. Mrs. Chipperton said she supposed so, and away we went. When we had rowed out to the middle of the spring, I stopped rowing, and we looked down into the depths. It was almost the same as looking into air. Far down at the bottom we could see the glittering sand and the green rocks, and sometimes a fish, as long as my arm, would slowly rise and[117] fall, and paddle away beneath us. We dropped nickels and copper cents down to the bottom, and we could plainly see them lying there. In some parts of the bottom there were "wells," or holes, about two feet in diameter, which seemed to go down indefinitely. These, we were told, were the places where the water came up from below into the spring. We could see the weeds and grasses that grew on the edges of these wells, although we could not see very far down into them.

"If I had only known," said Rectus, "what sort of a place we were coming to, I should have brought something to lower down into these wells. I tell you what would have been splendid!—a heavy bottle filled with sweet oil and some phosphorus, and a long cord. If we shook up the bottle it would shine, so that, when we lowered it into the wells, we could see it go down to the very bottom, that is, if the cord should be long enough."

At this instant, Corny went overboard! Rectus made a grab at her, but it was too late. He sprang to his feet, and I thought he was going over after her, but I seized him.

"Sit down!" said I. "Watch her! She'll come up again. Lean over and be ready for her!"

We both leaned over the bow as far as was safe. With one hand I gently paddled the boat, this way and that, so as to keep ourselves directly over Corny. It would have been of no use to jump in. We could see her as plainly as anything.

She was going down, all in a bunch, when I first[118] saw her, and the next instant she touched the bottom. Her feet were under now, and I saw her make a little spring. She just pushed out her feet.

Then she began to come right up. We saw her slowly rising beneath us. Her face was turned upward, and her eyes were wide open. It was a wonderful sight. I trembled from head to foot. It seemed as if we were floating in the air, and Corny was coming up to us from the earth.

Before she quite reached the surface, I caught her, and had her head out of water in an instant. Rectus then took hold, and with a mighty jerk, we pulled her into the

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