The hunters had set out for the work of the day; I remained behind with the women and children. I never left the side of my two sylvan goddesses: one was proud, the other sad. I did not understand a word of what they said to me, and they did not understand me; but I went to fetch water for their cup, shoots for their fire, mosses for their bed. They wore the petticoat and the wide, slashed sleeves of the Spanish women, the body and cloak of the Indian women. Their bare legs were cross-gartered with a lace-work of birch. They plaited their hair with posies or filaments of rushes; they mailed themselves in chains and necklaces of glass beads. From their ears hung purple berries; they had a fine talking paroquet: the bird of Armida; they fastened it on their shoulder like an emerald, or carried it hooded on their hand, as the great ladies of the tenth century carried their hawks. To harden their breasts and arms, they rubbed themselves with the apoya, or American gallingale. In Bengal the nautch-girls chew the betel-nut, and in the Levant the almes suck the mastic of Chio: the Floridan maidens pounded, between their teeth of a bluey whiteness, tears of liquid-amber and roots of _libanis_, which blended the fragrance of angelica, cedrat, and vanilla. They lived in an atmosphere of perfumes emanating from themselves, like orange-trees and flowers living in the pure exhalations from their leaves and chalices. I amused myself by placing a little ornament upon their heads: they submitted, gently dismayed; witches themselves, they thought I was working a charm upon them. One of them, the "proud" one, often prayed; she seemed to me half a Christian. The other sang in a voice of velvet, uttering at the end of each phrase a note that troubled one. Sometimes they spoke hastily to each other: I thought I could recognize the accents of jealousy, but the "sad" one wept, and silence was restored. Weak as I was, I sought examples of weakness, in order to encourage myself. Had not Camoëns in the Indies loved a black Barbary slave, and might not I in America do homage to two young jonquil sultanas? Had Camoëns not addressed _endechas_, or stanzas, to his _Barbaru escrava?_[514] * A fishing-party was arranged. The sun was nearing its setting. In the foreground appeared sassafras, tulip-trees, catalpas, and oaks, from whose boughs hung skeins of white moss. Behind this foreground rose the most charming of trees, the papaw, which might have been taken for a chased silver style, surmounted by a Corinthian urn. In the background reigned balsam-trees, magnolias, and liquid-ambers. [Sidenote: An exquisite landscape.]