The little maid believed in the story of the Drac, a sort of merman, that lived in the Rhone, and had power to fascinate the women who ventured into the water.  There was once a very widespread superstition concerning this Protean creature; and the women washing in the river often had a figure of the Drac, in the form of a lizard, carved upon the piece of wood with which they beat the linen, as a sort of talisman against his seduction.  The mother of the Anglore had told her of his wiles; and one story impressed her above all—­the story of the young woman who, fascinated by the Drac, lost her footing in the water and was carried whirling down into the depths.  At the end of seven years she returned and told her tale.  She had been seized by the Drac, and for seven years he kept her to nurse his little Drac.

The Anglore was never afraid while seeking the specks of gold in the sunlight.  But at night it was different.  A gem of poetry is the scene in the sixth canto, full of witchery and charm, wherein the imagination of the little maid, wandering out along the water in the mysterious moonlight, causes her to fancy she sees the Drac in the form of a fair youth smiling upon her, offering her a wild flower, uttering sweet, mysterious words of love that die away in the water.  She often came again to meet him; and she noticed that if ever she crossed herself on entering the water, as she had always done when a little girl, the Drac would not appear.  These three or four pages mark the genuine poet and the master of language.  The mysterious night, oppressively warm, the moonlight shining on the little white figure, the deep silence, broken only by the faint murmur of the river and the distant singing of a nightingale, the gleam of the glowworms, compose a scene of fantastic beauty.  The slightest sounds startle her, whether it be a fish leaping at the surface of the water to seize a fly, the gurgling of a little eddy, or the shrill cry of a bat.  There is a certain voluptuous beauty in the very sound of the words that describe the little nymph, kissed by the moonbeams:—­

                      “alusentido
    Per li rai de la luno que beisavon
    Soun fin coutet, sa jouino car ambrenco,
    Si bras poupin, sis esquino rabloto
    E si pousseto armouniouso e fermo
    Que s’amagavon coume dos tourtouro
    Dins l’esparpai de sa cabeladuro.”

The last three lines fall like a caress upon the ear.  Mistral often attains a perfect melody of words with the harmonious succession of varied vowel sounds and the well-marked cadence of his verse.