Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/827



wreaking dearth among the oaks and those quivering poplars that tremulously fringe the swampy lowlands. And the great stacks on their staddles shine, polished gold and ruddy, against the inflamed copses, the breezy purples of far away, the greener spaces of lower sky.

If the flood be out upon the marsh, and your dory with it, you may nose up many a run, under the shadow of the domed houses, and see the fresh tide laving their trailing thatch, and their semblances keen in its thin lucid mirror, wherein shines also the faint laughing visage of this amphibious land.

The excitement of poling above the stubble, far into the heart of such silence, is intense. As the last laborer turned from the ravaged marsh, the sea master followed these retreating footsteps. With him you seem to venture into an unknown country of surprise, wherein the accustomed face of nature is varied and alert, a country neither stable nor quite safe. For if you watch not your tide and keep no wary eye upon the dark serpent of a run you have trailed, the tide, drawing back to its bay again, laden with floating stock and wreck of weed, may leave you on a quaking soil, impossible for flesh or fish.

The marsh has renewed its equanimity. The foot of man has stepped from it, and purified, saline, compensated, it breathes in the hollow of a dream. And through the slumbrous Indian summer, when haze descends on the broads and irradiates the gleaming island farms, it lies unconscious of aught save the white wing and the regularity of tide.

And when frost is etched deep and ice hangs thick-lipped on the creeks, and great floes rise and crack with impulsion from the sea, the marsh then, in gold and white, awaits its final despoilment.

Long after, in loneliness and desertion, it trembles at the cannonade upon the bar, and feels the spume and showering spray borne inland by Atlantic gales. Terrible hosts war upon it in blind darkness. It