But the Professor was glad to get it, and saw no occasion for sweetness at all. He wanted to go on with De Vaca; and so, setting the hat firmly on the back of his head, he threw the scarf over the top, and tied the long ends firmly under his chin. The effect was striking, especially in profile, and we were glad when the landing at Fish Island gave us an opportunity to let out our laughter over hastily improvised and idiotic jokes, while, all unconscious, the Professor went on behind us, and carried De Vaca into the thirteenth chapter.
The island began with a morass, and the boatmen went back for planks.
“‘Away to the Dismal Swamp he speeds,’” said Iris, balancing herself on an oyster shell, Mokes by her side (the Captain was absent--trust Aunt Diana for that!). “Those verses always haunt one so, don’t they?”
Mokes, as usual in the rear, mentally speaking, wanted to know “what verses?”
“Moore’s _Dismal Swamp_, of course. Sometimes I find myself saying it over fifty times a day:
‘They have made her a grave too cold and damp For a soul so warm and true; She has gone to the Lake of the Dismal Swamp, Where all night long, by a fire-fly lamp, She paddles her white canoe.’
Be sure and pronounce ‘swamp’ to rhyme exactly with ‘damp’ and ‘lamp,’” continued Iris; “the effect is more tragic.”
Passing the morass on planks, we walked down a path bordered with Spanish-bayonets, crossed the creek on a small boat lying there, and entered the enchanted domain. It seemed to be a large plantation run to waste; symmetrical fields surrounded by high hedges of the sour orange, loaded with its fruit; old furrows still visible in the never-freezing ground; every where traces of careful labor and cultivation, which had made the sandy island blossom as the rose. In the centre of a broad lawn were the ruins of a mansion, the white chimney alone standing, like a monument to the past. Beyond, a path led down to a circle of trees with even, dense foliage; there, in the centre, shut out from the glare of the sunshine, alone in the greenery, stood a solitary tomb, massive and dark, without date or inscription save what the little fingers of the lichen had written. We stood around in silence, and presently another pleasure party came down the path and joined us--gay young girls with sprays of orange blossoms in their hats, young men carrying trailing wreaths of the yellow jasmine. Together we filled the green tree circle; and one of the strangers, a fair young girl, moved by a sudden impulse, stepped forward and laid a spray of jasmine on the lonely tomb.