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?I do not see how one can ever tire of the journey from New Orleans to ?over the lake.? It is full of entertainment. The train trundles through that long, dreary, inappropriately named Champ Elysees, or as we Americans phrase it in our acid vernacular, ?Le-shum Fields,? and then burrows and gnaws, like a rabbit, its way through a tropic jungle of cane brake and indigo and wild coffee and passion vines shadowed over by live oaks clasping and unclasping their stealthy fingers of moss that pantomime the wind.
?With a sort of theatrical rush, the train comes racing down its rut like a huge black ball and bounds out into the sea marsh, that strangely beautiful prairie that is neither land nor water. It is an unbroken level of sedge and bulrush, of lily and cattail and marsh grass on whose coarse, thick leaves the rice birds swing.
?It has all the shades of gray and all the shades of green, and here and there the rushes part to make room for a pool of water that gives back, as if in payment for the grace, a fairer picture of rushes and bird and dappled sky. It looks like Nebraska but it feels like India.
A sea of rushes
?It is a dull morning; it may rain but that the sky holds enough blue to
make the old traditional pair of Dutchman?s breeches that is bound to bring fair weather. Clouds let down islands of shadow upon the pale green and gray sea of wavering rushes that seem to ruri away like timid sheep.
?The white side of a sail shows where some sloop is threading the needle of a bayou; it shows like a truce flag from some unseen foe. Far away the angry hordes of forest trees \ crowd darkly, gathering like a storm , cloud. Birds race by, challenging the , train. A pool of sunlight, like spilled , quicksilver, glints on the lake that widens Gulfward at'our right.
?And then we run into the pine lands. Everywhere the trees stand straight, clean and thick as palisades.
A perfume of tea comes in the windows. The very smell of a pine forest is healthful and sustaining. All the nakedness of the prairie is gone, exchanged for the forest, for shallow' pools set out with the frosted green plates of the water lilies whose blossoms are like porcelain cups holding dew from which butterflies and fairy godmothers alone may drink. ?	- *
May 28: Cole visits Mississip-' pi Coast resorts.
?	Kat Bergeron is a staff writer for The Su^^i Herald
JOE SCHOLTES COLLECTION,
Mrs. Chester Wilcox enjoys the Sound?s oyster gray water in 1890<