We can feast our eyes upon it at all hours of the
day and night. Tom has told Kitty, in the way of business, that he has no
use for that fall. She may draw it or not, as she likes. She does draw
it; she draws it, and water-colors it, and chalks it in colored crayons,
and India-inks it, loading on the Chinese white; and she charcoals it, in
moonlight effects, on a gray-blue paper. But do it whatever way she will,
she never can do it.
"Oh, you exquisite, hopeless thing! Why can't I let you alone!" she cries;
"and why can't you let _me_ alone!"
"It is rather hard, the way the thing doubles up on you," says Tom.
"The real fall, right side up, is bad enough; but when it comes to the
reflection of it, standing on its head in the lagoon, I should lie right
down myself. I wouldn't pull another pound."
("_Lay_ down," he said; but I thought you wouldn't stand it. Tom would
never spoil a cherished bit of dialect because of shocking anybody with his
grammar.)
Kitty throws herself back in the dry salt-grass with which the whole of
our little peninsula is bedded. The willows and brakes are our curtains,
through which the rising moon looks in at us, and the setting sun; the sun
rises long before we see him, above the dark-blue mountains beyond the
shore.
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