of females, the nymphs of the
salt-marsh; and all through that day the singing, stinging, smothering
swarm danced about me, rested upon me, covered me whenever I paused, so
that my black leggings turned instantly to a mosquito brown, and all my
dress seemed dyed alike.

Only I did not pause--not often, nor long. The sun came up blisteringly
hot, yet on I walked, and wore my coat, my hands deep down in the pockets
and my head in a handkerchief. At noon I was still walking, and kept on
walking till I reached the bay shore, when a breeze came up, and drove the
singing, stinging fairies back into the grass, and saved me.

I left the road at a point where a low bank started across the marsh like
a long protecting arm reaching out around the hay-meadows, dragging them
away from the grasping river, and gathering them out of the vast undrained
tract of coarse sedges, to hold them to the upland. Passing along the bank
until beyond the weeds and scrub of the higher borders, I stood with the
sky-bound, bay-bound green beneath my feet. Far across, with sails
gleaming white against the sea of sedge, was a schooner, beating slowly up
the river. Laying my course by her, I began to beat slowly out into the
marsh through the heavy sea of low, matted hay-grass.

There is no fresh-water meadow, no inland plain, no prairie with this
rainy, misty, early morning freshness so constant on the marsh; no other
reach of green so green, so a-glitter with seas of briny dew, so
regularly, unfailingly fed:

Look how the grace of the sea doth go
About and about through the intricate channels that flow
Here and there,
Everywhere,
Till his waters have flooded the uttermost creeks and the low-lying lanes,
And the marsh is meshed with a million veins!

I imagine a Western wheat-field, half-way to head, could look, in the dew
of morning, somewhat like a salt-marsh. It certainly would have at times
the purple-distance haze, that atmosphere of the sea which hangs across
the marsh. The two might resemble each other as two pictures of the same
theme, upon the same scale, one framed and hung, the other not. It is the
framing, the setting of the marsh that gives it character, variety, tone,
and its touch of mystery.

For the marsh reaches back to the higher lands of fences, fields of corn,
and ragged forest blurs against the hazy horizon; it reaches down to the
river of the reedy flats, coiled like a serpent through