Page:Wisdom of the Wilderness (1923).pdf/154

 clematis and starred with wild convolvulus. From the sharply defined edge of this gracious tangle a beach of clean sand, dazzlingly white, sloped down to, and slid beneath, the transparent golden lip of the amber-tinted water. The sand, both below and above the water's edge, was of an amazing radiance. Being formed by the infinitely slow breaking down of the ancient granite, through ages of alternating suns and rains and heats and frosts, it consisted purely of the indestructible, coarse, white crystals of the quartz, whose facets caught the sun like a drift of diamonds.

The opposite shores of the lake were low and swampy, studded here and there with tall, naked, weather-bleached "rampikes"—the trunks of ancient fir trees blasted and stripped by some longpast forest fire. These melancholy ghosts of trees rose from a riotously gold-green carpet of rank marsh grasses, sweeping around in an interminable, unbroken curve to the foot of the lake, where, through the cool shadows of water ash and balsam poplar, the trout-haunted outlet stream rippled away musically to join the sea some seven or eight miles farther on. All along the golden-green sweep of the marsh grass spread acre upon acre of the flat leaves of the water lily, starred with broad, white, golden-hearted, ex-