"Sainte Pitie! Est-çe que vous croire que le va levé apres so' bon diner au poisson pou' vini donner nous autres la sainte messe? Bon Dieu la Sainte Vierge! Ha! Ha!" "Holy Mother! But it is French, en glacé,--crushed, with the cream swimming and the flavor heightened!" Todd alone stared out across the dim, majestic river through De Soto's eyes. He tried to feel himself the man, to prophesy as that seer had prophesied. The great city and the long levees were builded in that vanished mind, before the first adobe brick was moulded, or the first dark cedar hewn. Now in himself, as Todd the new American minister, he felt the country of his dreams creep nearer, lured by the magnet of the Panama Canal. Within his own life, should God be pleased to spare him to a fair old age, new craft would thread the Mississippi delta, small merchantmen at first, and sailing vessels, each with the banner of the red sun on its mast. Asiatic labor, silent, skilful, insidious, would contest for preeminence with the saturnine Dago, the "cayjin," the Quadroon, and the established African. Each moment, westward from the city, held a novelty and a delight. The sugar-fields of Louisiana, stretching for leaden-colored miles, and soon to be pierced by myriad tiny spears of awakening green, appeared to Yuki a giant sort of rice-field from her own land. "If it were cut up into many small piece, all of different shape and size, with little crooked baby-levees binding the edges,--it would be exacterlee the winter rice-fields of Nippon." Sometimes, in an island of higher ground, the white-columned house of a sugar-planter gleamed, and near it rose mammoth live oaks, huge tumuli of green, the underbranches swaying with grizzled moss. In the open country, such trees crouched low above stealthy creeks, or blotted widening lagoons. While in the city, they had read and heard of recent heavy rains to the West, flooding a wide agricultural district. On the borderland of Texas, they knew they had reached the threatened fields. Cypress, magnolia, sweet gum, and bay trees stood knee deep in a sea of dull chrome, churned from roads of clay. It seemed a lake of yellow onyx. Between the trunks writhed a tropical disorder of vines, palmetto, and undergrowth. In wide, clear spaces, drifting fence rails or half-submerged buildings told of ruin already accomplished. Now the whole unstable sea was covered by a carpet of the floating "water-hyacinth," which, in later months, was to turn the bayous and lagoons into veins of amethyst. It seemed incredible to the little party, staring solemnly from train windows, that they were in temperate America at all. Every floating spar of wood became an alligator's head, every springing tuft of white swamp flower a meditative stork. Night fell swiftly upon the watery forest, sucked down into it as to a familiar lair. With the next morning, the world had changed to a dry desert, above which arched an unrelated sky.