rom you. I thought God had set his mark
on you if he ever had on any man. And it is for things like this that
you set your soul back a thousand years from God. O foolish and perverse
generation!"

Eric drew himself up to his full height and looked off to where the new
day was gilding the corn-tassels and flooding the uplands with light.
As his nostrils drew in the breath of the dew and the morning, something
from the only poetry he had ever read flashed across his mind, and he
murmured, half to himself, with dreamy exultation:

"'And a day shall be as a thousand years, and a thousand years as a
day.'"

The Enchanted Bluff

We had our swim before sundown, and while we were cooking our supper the
oblique rays of light made a dazzling glare on the white sand about
us. The translucent red ball itself sank behind the brown stretches
of cornfield as we sat down to eat, and the warm layer of air that had
rested over the water and our clean sand bar grew fresher and smelled of
the rank ironweed and sunflowers growing on the flatter shore. The river
was brown and sluggish, like any other of the half-dozen streams that
water the Nebraska corn lands. On one shore was an irregular line of
bald clay bluffs where a few scrub oaks with thick trunks and flat,
twisted tops threw light shadows on the long grass. The western shore
was low and level, with cornfields that stretched to the skyline, and
all along the water's edge were little sandy coves and beaches where
slim cottonwoods and willow saplings flickered.

The turbulence of the river in springtime discouraged milling, and,
beyond keeping the old red bridge in repair, the busy farmers did not
concern themselves with the stream; so the Sandtown boys were left in
undisputed possession. In the autumn we hunted quail through the miles
of stubble and fodder land along the flat shore, and, after the winter
skating season was over and the ice had gone out, the spring freshets
and flooded bottoms gave us our great excitement of the year. The
channel was never the same for two successive seasons. Every spring the
swollen stream undermined a bluff to the east, or bit out a few acres of
cornfield to the west and whirled the soil away, to deposit it in spumy
mud banks somewhere else. When the water fell low in midsummer, new sand
bars were thus exposed to dry and whiten in the August sun. Sometimes
these were banked so firmly that the fury of the next freshet failed to
unseat them