-grass,
bay-bushes, and wild-roses.

In such a country you could not expect a little brook to be noisy,
fussy, energetic. If it were not lazy, it would be out of keeping.

But the actual and undisguised idleness of this particular brook was
another affair, and one in which it was distinguished among its fellows.
For almost all the other little rivers of the South Shore, lazy as they
may be by nature, yet manage to do some kind of work before they finish
the journey from their crystal-clear springs into the brackish waters
of the bay. They turn the wheels of sleepy gristmills, while the miller
sits with his hands in his pockets underneath the willow-trees. They
fill reservoirs out of which great steam-engines pump the water to
quench the thirst of Brooklyn. Even the smaller streams tarry long
enough in their seaward sauntering to irrigate a few cranberry-bogs
and so provide that savoury sauce which makes the Long Island turkey a
fitter subject for Thanksgiving.

But this brook of which I speak did none of these useful things. It was
absolutely out of business.

There was not a mill, nor a reservoir, nor a cranberry-bog, on all its
course of a short mile. The only profitable affair it ever undertook was
to fill a small ice-pond near its entrance into the Great South Bay.
You could hardly call this a very energetic enterprise. It amounted to
little more than a good-natured consent to allow itself to be used by
the winter for the making of ice, if the winter happened to be cold
enough. Even this passive industry came to nothing; for the water, being
separated from the bay only by a short tideway under a wooden bridge on
the south country road, was too brackish to freeze easily; and the ice,
being pervaded with weeds, was not much relished by the public. So the
wooden ice-house, innocent of paint, and toned by the weather to a soft,
sad-coloured gray, stood like an improvised ruin among the pine-trees
beside the pond.

It was through this unharvested ice-pond, this fallow field of water,
that my lady Graygown and I entered on acquaintance with our lazy, idle
brook. We had a house, that summer, a few miles down the bay. But it was
a very small house, and the room that we like best was out of doors.
So we spent much time in a sailboat,--by name "The Patience,"--making
voyages of exploration into watery corners and byways. Sailing past the
wooden bridge one day, when a strong east wind had made a very low
tide, we observe