y-white eggs. The hen had
to stand on the bushes straddling the nest in order to brood. How she ever
got as close to the nest as that without spilling its contents was hard to
see; for I took an egg out and had the greatest difficulty in putting it
back, so little room was there, so near to nothing for it to rest upon.

Working back into the channel, I gave the skiff to the easy current and
drew slowly along toward the foot of the pond.

The sun had gone down behind the hill; the flame had faded from the sky,
and over the rim of the circling slopes poured the soft, cool twilight,
with a breeze as soft and cool, and a spirit that was prayer. Drifting
across the pond as gently as the gray half-light fell a shower of lint
from the willow catkins. The swallows had left; but from the leafy
darkness of the copse in front of me, piercing the dreamy, foamy roar of
the distant dam, came the notes of a wood-thrush, pure, sweet, and
peaceful, speaking the soul of the quiet time. My boat grated softly on
the sandy bottom of the cove and swung in. Out from the deep shadow of the
wooded shore, out over the pond, a thin white veil was creeping--the
mist, the breath of the sleeping water, the spirit of the stream. And away
up the creek a distorted, inarticulate sound--the hoarse, guttural croak
of the great blue heron, the weird, uncanny cry of the night, the mock,
the menace of the tangled, untamed swamp!

THE DRAGON OF THE SWALE

[Illustration]

THE DRAGON OF THE SWALE

My path to Cubby Hollow ran along a tumbling worm-fence, down a gravelly
slope, and across a strip of swale, through which flowed the stream that
farther on widened into the Hollow. A small jungle of dog-roses, elder,
and blackberry tangled the banks of the stream, spreading into flanks of
cinnamon-fern that crept well up the hillsides.

As I descended the gravelly slope, my path led through the ferns into a
tunnel of vines, to a rail over the water, and on up to the woods. By the
middle of June the tangle, except by the half-broken path, was almost
rabbit-proof. The rank ferns waved to my chin, and were so thick that
they left little trace of my passing until late in the summer.

This bit of the swale from the lower edge of the gravelly slope to the
edge of the woods on the opposite slope was the lair of a dragon. My path
cut directly across it.

Perhaps the dragon had been there ever since I had known the swale, and
summer after summer