s and fripperies of color. The
salt marsh, to be sure, never lacks these, even in the dead of
winter, when high tides continually load it with sea ice, and then
receding leave it piled with fantastic hummocks and pressure
ridges like the Arctic sea. It has gleams of emerald and azure
welling from its hummocks under gray skies. The tattered crimson
of windy sunsets gets tangled in its floes and flutters in ragged
beauty, and it treasures the sun's gold in the dusk of still
evenings. Spring tints it with soft graygreens and autumn seems to
use it for a mixing pot for the coloring of the October woods. All
their flame and gold are there, toned to soft warm browns and
tender olives just flecked with crimson and with yellow flame.

Looking westward from the island at high tide this morning you
could see already deep hints of this coming autumn coloring,
swelling out of the deep green of grasses that make up the main
carpeting of the marsh, touches of brown and olive that are
singularly pleasing to the eye under the summer blue of the sky
and its fleecy flecking of white clouds. Amid these, scattered
here and there, round eye-like pools reflect this summer blue and
fleecy whiteness and all along the island's verge and that of
other islands and the borders of the Glades was the pink of wild
roses and morning glories, both of which seem to thrive better and
bloom later in the season here than inland. But the softest and
loveliest coloring that the marsh will ever get is that which the
gray mists of early morning seem to have brought in and left like
a fragrant memory of themselves, the lavender gray of the
marsh-rosemary. "There's rosemary; that's for remembrance," said
Ophelia, and many a lover of sea and marsh-side will carry longest
in memory the gentle sadness that the tint of the sea-lavender
gives the marsh when all its other colors are still those of the
flush joy of summer. Remembering Ophelia, marsh-rosemary seems its
best name, though you have a right to sea-lavender if you wish. If
the sea fogs did not bring it as an essence of the first glimpse
of dawn in gray ocean spaces, then I am convinced that the loving
tides bear it as a gift to the island and scatter it shyly at its
feet, after dark.

You have but to wander about the shores of the island at the marsh
line to find strange evidence of this gift-bearing propensity of
the shy tides. Trinkets of all sorts that they gather in travels
in distant seas the tides