Ronsard[515] shows us Mary Stuart[516] ready to set out for Scotland after the death of François II[517]. Was I like Mary Stuart wandering through Fontainebleau, when I wandered about my savannah after my widowerhood? One thing is certain, that my mind, if not my person, was wrapped in "a long crape, subtil and flowing," as Ronsard also says, that old poet of the new school. The devil having flown away with the Muskhogulge damsels, I was told by the guide that a "Burnt-wood," who was in love with one of the two women, was jealous of me and had resolved with a Seminole, the brother of the other cousin, to carry Atala and Céluta off from me. The guides spoke of them bluntly as "painted girls," which shocked my vanity. I felt the more humiliated in that the "Burnt-wood," my favoured rival, was a lean, ugly, dark-skinned mosquito, possessing all the characteristics of the insects which, according to the entomologists of the Grand Lama, are animals whose flesh is inside their bones. Solitude appeared empty to me after my misadventure. I gave the cold shoulder to my sylph, who generously hastened to console her faithless lover, like Julie when she forgave Saint-Preux his Parisian Floridans[518]. I lost no time in quitting the desert in which I have since resuscitated the drowsy companions of my night. I know not whether I gave back to them the life they gave me: at least I made a virgin of one, a virtuous spouse of the other, by way of expiation. We again crossed the Blue Mountains, and approached the European clearings in the neighbourhood of Chillicothe. I had gathered no light upon the principal object of my enterprise; but I was escorted by a world of poetry: Comme une jeune abeille aux roses engagée Ma muse revenait de son butin chargée[519]. On the bank of a stream I saw an American house: at one end a farm-house, at the other a mill. I went in, asked for food and shelter, and was well received. My hostess led me by a ladder to a room above the shaft of the hydraulic apparatus. My little casement-window, festooned with ivy and cobæas with iris bells, opened above the stream which flowed, narrow and solitary, between two thick borders of willows, elms, sassafras, tamarinds, and Carolina poplars. The moss-grown mill-wheel turned beneath their shade and let fall long ribands of water. Perch and trout leapt in the foam of the eddy; water-wagtails flew from bank to bank, and various kinds of kingfishers fluttered their blue wings above the current. How happy should I have been there with the "sad" one, had she been faithful to me, seated dreaming at her feet, my head laid upon her knees, listening to the noise of the weir, the rotations of the wheel, the rolling of the mill-stone, the sifting of the bolter, the even beating of the clapper, breathing the freshness of the water and the scent from the husks of the pearl-barley.