Page:Athletics and Manly Sport (1890).djvu/505

440 a word shot the intruder. It was a moccasin that had come out of the canebrake and coiled himself to enjoy the fire.

One day Moseley was out on the lake fishing, and I was paddling quietly under the trees on the bank, hoping to shoot a red-bird or a crowned thrush for specimens. I heard Moseley hail me, and answered, but then he went on in a very queer way talking with some one in the swamp beyond me. At last I went out to him and found that he had discovered an echo of wonderful clearness, and which was otherwise interesting. Near the shore I had not heard it, but a quarter of a mile out it was startlingly distinct.

The sound was quite unlike the hard resonance thrown back from cliff, mountain, or cave. It smacked of the swamp in a manner hard to describe. The repetition was largely magnified, though it seemed to be thrown to a distance, and to come from a great height, as if it had bounded up from the wide field of the swamp. The sound had an elastic click about it, like the remote stroke of a woodman's axe. It was the echo from a wood, unmistakably, and not from a wall.

Strange to say, the best word to throw to an echo is its own name. It loves to fling it back undipped and sudden. Divide the syllables,