Page:Early Spring in Massachusetts (1881).djvu/327

Rh swiftly spreading along it, making a dark blue ripple. Now four or five windy bolts, sharp or. blunt, strike it at once and spread different ways. The boisterous but playful north wind evidently stoops from a considerable height to dally with this fair pool which it discerns beneath. You could sit there and watch these blue shadows playing over the surface like light and shade on changeable silk, for hours. It reminds me, too, of swift Camilla on a field of grain. The wind often touches the water only by the finest points or edges. It is thus when you look in some measure from the sun, but if you move round so as to come more nearly opposite to him, then these dark blue ripples are all sparkles too bright to look at, for now you see the sides of the wavelets which reflect the sun to you Watching the ripples fall and dart across the surface of low lying and small woodland lakes is one of the amusements of these windy March and April days. It is only on small lakes deep sunk in hollows in the woods that you can see or study them these days, for the winds sweep over the whole breadth of larger lakes incessantly, but they only touch these sheltered lakelets by fine points and edges from time to time.

And then there is such a fiddling in the woods, such a viol creaking of bough on bough