Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/825

Rh Then draws near the marsh hour of reticence.

However far the moon probe silver index along a creek noiselessly filling with sea, however limpid the strange enamel of its light brimming the champlevé of the plain, little is divulged and less denoted. By the dim runnel floats an evanescence of sweet grass, hidden, shy. Savored once, it is already vanished; yet, keener, sweeter under the flood of dew than when day seeks it out and crushes it in heat, it is yours once more by the next fence, though at last it slip away.

Your fancy must step with twilight as it withdraws. Long huddled caravans of marsh-oak are encamped, their ungainly beasts of the desert loose-hobbled for the night. The stacks beyond, looming in wavering mist, are hooded tents of vagrants and wanderers, crouching for an hour.

Is it the vast river, flowing silently there? Are those its templed recesses, indeterminate, stretching into the vague? Strange birds bark out of the silence. Gigantic forms sway in closing gloom. Even the moon is drowned. And only that broad Something like a Nile floods steadily through your dreams that night—flowing from rock-cut faces to a delta.

The marsh is the most reserved of all lands. Self-appointed, it is careless keeper of unhedged preserves. For in summer its tide of coarse rank grass fulls deep above ooze and black mud. Your dog's inquisitive plume may wave over its less treacherous levels as he dashes after wild fowl already risen. Cows stray a little from plashy sloping meadows into rich foot-holes. Unseen snake may trail sinuous grasses around the little hummock, exploring mole or field-mouse astray slip or slop horribly in a miniature quagmire. But the debatable land once fairly past, the voice of the marsh is upheld by wing alone.

Dike-paths across it there be, invisible for folding grass (save when the farmer