drift at the edge
of the wet meadow. They ran away screaming, leaving behind a pair of
spotted sandpipers, "till-tops," that had been wading with them in the
shallow water. The sandpipers teetered on for a few steps, then rose at my
approach, scaled nervously out over the drowned grass, and, circling,
alighted near where they had taken wing, continuing instantly with their
hunt, and calling _Tweet-tweet, tweet-tweet_, and teetering, always
teetering, as they tiptoed along.

If perpetual motion is still a dream of the physicist, he might get an
idea by carefully examining the way the body of till-top is balanced on
its needle legs. If till-tops have not been tilting forever, and shall not
go on tilting forever, it is because something is wrong with the mechanism
of the world outside their little spotted bodies. Surely the easiest,
least willed motion in all the universe is this sandpiper's teeter,
teeter, teeter, as it hurries peering and prying along the shore.

Killdeers and sandpipers are noisy birds; and one would know, after half a
day upon the marsh, even if he had never seen these birds before, that
they could not have been bred here. For however

candid and simple and nothing-withholding and free

the marsh may seem to one coming suddenly from the wooded uplands, it will
not let one enter far without the consciousness that silence and secrecy
lie deeper here than in the depths of the forest glooms. The true birds of
the marsh, those that feed and nest in the grass, have the spirit of the
great marsh-mother. The sandpiper is not her bird. It belongs to the
shore, living almost exclusively along sandy, pebbly margins, the margins
of any, of almost every water, from Delaware Bay to the tiny bubbling
spring in some Minnesota pasture. Neither is the killdeer her bird. The
upland claims it, plover though it be. A barren, stony hillside, or even a
last year's corn-field left fallow, is a better-loved breast to the
killdeer than the soft brooding breast of the marsh. There are no
grass-birds so noisy as these two. Both of them lay their eggs in pebble
nests; and both depend largely for protection upon the harmony of their
colors with the general tone of their surroundings.

I was still within sound of the bleating killdeers when a rather large,
greenish-gray bird flapped heavily but noiselessly from a muddy spot in
the grass to the top of a stake and faced me. Here was a child of the
marsh. Its bolt-upright atti