Just where it winds about the northwest
of the city are some of its most beautiful bits, orange groves on
one side, and quaint old Spanish gardens on the other. Who cares
that the bridges are modern, and that here and there pert
boat-houses rear their prim heads? It is the bayou, even though
it be invaded with the ruthless vandalism of the improving idea,
and can a boat-house kill the beauty of a moss-grown centurion of
an oak with a history as old as the city? Can an iron bridge
with tarantula piers detract from the song of a mocking-bird in a
fragrant orange grove? We know that farther out, past the
Confederate Soldiers' Home,--that rose-embowered, rambling place
of gray-coated, white-haired old men with broken hearts for a
lost cause,--it flows, unimpeded by the faintest conception of
man, and we love it all the more that, like the Priestess of
Isis, it is calm-browed, even in indignity.
To its banks at the end of Moss Street, one day there came a man
and a maiden. They were both tall and lithe and slender, with
the agility of youth and fire. He was the final concentration of
the essence of Spanish passion filtered into an American frame;
she, a repressed Southern exotic, trying to fit itself into the
niches of a modern civilisation. Truly, a fitting couple to seek
the bayou banks.
They climbed the levee that stretched a feeble check to waters
that seldom rise, and on the other side of the embankment, at the
brink of the river, she sat on a log, and impatiently pulled off
the little cap she wore.
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