After that day and night, the prospect grew less repellent.  A gradually matured conviction that New Orleans would not be found standing on stilts in the quagmire enabled the eye to become educated to a better appreciation of the solemn landscape.  Nor was the landscape always solemn.  There were long openings, now and then, to right and left, of emerald-green savannah, with the dazzling blue of the Gulf far beyond, waving a thousand white-handed good-byes as the funereal swamps slowly shut out again the horizon.  How sweet the soft breezes off the moist prairies!  How weird, how very near, the crimson and green and black and yellow sunsets!  How dream-like the land and the great, whispering river!  The profound stillness and breath reminded the old German, so he said, of that early time when the evenings and mornings were the first days of the half-built world.  The barking of a dog in Fort Plaquemines seemed to come before its turn in the panorama of creation—­before the earth was ready for the dog’s master.

But he was assured that to live in those swamps was not entirely impossible to man—­“if one may call a negro a man.”  Runaway slaves were not so rare in them as one—­a lost hunter, for example—­might wish.  His informant was a new passenger, taken aboard at the fort.  He spoke English.

“Yes, sir!  Didn’ I had to run from Bras-Coupe in de haidge of de swamp be’ine de ’abitation of my cousin Honore, one time?  You can hask ’oo you like!” (A Creole always provides against incredulity.) At this point he digressed a moment:  “You know my cousin, Honore Grandissime, w’at give two hund’ fifty dolla’ to de ‘ospill laz mont’?  An’ juz because my cousin Honore give it, somebody helse give de semm.  Fo’ w’y don’t he give his nemm?”

The reason (which this person did not know) was that the second donor was the first one over again, resolved that the little unknown Monk should not know whom she had baffled.

“Who was Bras-Coupe?” the good German asked in French.

The stranger sat upon the capstan, and, in the shadow of the cypress forest, where the vessel lay moored for a change of wind, told in a patois difficult, but not impossible, to understand, the story of a man who chose rather to be hunted like a wild beast among those awful labyrinths, than to be yoked and beaten like a tame one.  Joseph, drawing near as the story was coming to a close, overheard the following English: 

“Friend, if you dislike heated discussion, do not tell that to my son.”

The nights were strangely beautiful.  The immigrants almost consumed them on deck, the mother and daughters attending in silent delight while the father and son, facing south, rejoiced in learned recognition of stars and constellations hitherto known to them only on globes and charts.

“Yes, my dear son,” said the father, in a moment of ecstatic admiration, “wherever man may go, around this globe—­however uninviting his lateral surroundings may be, the heavens are ever over his head, and I am glad to find the stars your favorite objects of study.”