"He'll love us, my babies!" she cried to the kittens in the basket, and forthwith plied her paddle so feverishly that in a few minutes she had to stop and take breath.
The river at this point wound through low meadows, sparsely treed with the towering, majestic water poplar, sycamore, and arching elm, with here and there a graceful river birch leaning pensively to contemplate its reflection in the stream. The trees and flowers were personal to Barbara, her quick senses differentiating them unerringly. The low meadow, swampy in spots, was a mass of herbs, shrubs, and rank grasses, for the most part now in full flower; and the sun was busy distilling from them all their perfumes, which came to Barbara's nostrils in warm, fitful, varying puffs. She noted the tenderly flushing feathery masses of meadowsweet, which she could never quite forgive for its lack of the perfume promised by its name. From the dry knolls came the heavy scent of the tall, bold umbels of the wild parsnip, at which she sniffed with passing resentment. Another breath of wind, and a turn of the stream into a somewhat less open neighbourhood, brought her a sweet and well-loved savour, and she half rose in her place to greet the presence of a thicket of swamp honeysuckle. She noted, as she went, pale crimson colonies of the swamp rose, hummed over softly by the bees and flies. Purple Jacob's-ladder draped the bushes luxuriantly, with wild clematis in lavish banks, and aerial stretches of the roseate monkey-flower on its almost invisible stems. Her heart went out to a cluster of scented snakemouth under the rim of the bank. She was about to turn her prow shoreward and gather the modest pinkish blossoms for their enchanting fragrance, when she observed leaning above them her mortal enemy among the tree-folk, the virulent poison sumac. She swerved sharply to the other side of the stream to avoid its hostile exhalations.
The little river now widened out and became still more sluggish. A narrow meadow island in mid-stream intoxicated Barbara's eyes with colour, being fringed with rank on rank of purple flag-flower, and its grassy heart flame-spotted with the blooms of the wild lily. The still water along the shores was crowded with floating-heart, and pale-blossomed arrowhead, and blue, rank pickerel-weed; and Barbara, who did not mind the heat, but revelled in the carnival of colour, drew a deep breath and declared to herself (giving the flat lie to ten thousand former assertions of the like intimacy) that the world was a beautiful place to live in. No sooner had she said it than her heart sank under a flood of bitter memories. She seemed once more to feel the water singing in her ears, to see its golden blur filling her eyes, as on that morning when she lay drowning in the lake. The glory of the summer day lost something of its brightness, and she paddled on doggedly, looking neither to the right hand nor to the left.