the water, sometimes scratching a long streak across
its mirror-like surface as she uses both feet and wings in her haste
to escape from the lone pedestrian. At sundown the sandhill crane may
sometimes be surprised, standing like a silhouette by the shore of a
grassy island. The awkward, wary bittern and the still more vigilant
least bittern are familiar residents here.

Below the dam the creek winds at will through a peaceful valley,
appropriating to itself an ever widening stretch from the farm lands.
Sometimes it hastens down a pebbly speedway, then slackens its pace
and wanders off from its course until suddenly it seems to grow
alarmed, whips around a bend and comes hurrying back. Sometimes its
level flood-plain is a quarter mile wide, bounded on either side by
steep timbered hills which stretch on and on down the valley until the
sky receives them in a glory of blue haze. Sometimes the creek has cut
its way straight down the face of a high rock cliff on one side, while
on the other side is a level meadow with bushy-margined ponds. In
places the water of the creek lies asleep in a dream of sunshine, but
further on it ripples and gurgles over a bouldered bed, walled in by
rocky slopes. These are kept moist by water trickling down from hidden
springs among the roots of the shrubs and vines, ferns and mosses
which soften the grim limestone into beauty of form and color.

[Illustration: "LIES ASLEEP IN A DREAM OF SUNSHINE" (p. 111)]

In the cool days of September, when walking is a fine art, I love to
accompany the lower portion of the old creek down to the river,
following the little path made by farmer boys and fishermen. The two
posts at the fence by the roadside, set just far enough apart for a
man to squeeze himself through, are the gates to a land elysian. When
I pass through them I am a thousand miles from the city with its toil
and pain, its strife and sorrow. Worldly cares drop from my back as I
stand upon the brink of this creek and watch the water spreading
itself out over the white sand. Time and distance lose their force as
factors in my life. I have found and entered the lost lands of
Theocritus. Beneath this black ash, touched here and there with the
purple wistfulness of the passing year, Pan might have sat to play his
pipes, the Cyclops might have pleaded with the graceful Galatea. This
haze which hangs over the white oak grove, for aught I know, may be
the incense from Druid fires. Along this valle