[16]
For the 'Black Robe' spake much of his youth
and his friends in the Land of the Sunrise;
It was then as a dream; now in truth
I behold them, and not in a vision."
But more spake her blushes, I ween,
and her eyes full of language unspoken,
As she turned with the grace of a queen
and carried her gifts to the _teepee_.
Far away from his beautiful France--
from his home in the city of Lyons,
A noble youth full of romance,
with a Norman heart big with adventure,
In the new world a wanderer, by chance
DuLuth sought the wild Huron forests.
But afar by the vale of the Rhone,
the winding and musical river,
And the vine-covered hills of the Saone,
the heart of the wanderer lingered,--
'Mid the vineyards and mulberry trees,
and the fair fields of corn and of clover
That rippled and waved in the breeze,
while the honey-bees hummed in the blossoms.
For there, where th' impetuous Rhone,
leaping down from the Switzerland mountains,
And the silver-lipped, soft-flowing Saone,
meeting, kiss and commingle together,
Down winding by vineyards and leas,
by the orchards of fig-trees and olives,
To the island-gemmed, sapphire-blue seas
of the glorious Greeks and the Romans;
Aye, there, on the vine-covered shore,
'mid the mulberry-trees and the olives,
Dwelt his blue-eyed and beautiful Flore,
with her hair like a wheat-field at harvest,
All rippled and tossed by the breeze,
and her cheeks like the glow of the morning,
Far away o'er the emerald seas,
as the sun lifts his brow from the billows,
Or the red-clover fields when the bees,
singing sip the sweet cups of the blossoms.
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