nse, and came to the faces of those who looked seaward like another
tide; when a steel-like glint marked the low hollows and the sinuous
line of slough; when the great shell-incrusted trunks of fallen trees
arose again, and went forth on their dreary, purposeless wanderings,
drifting hither and thither, but getting no farther toward any goal
at the falling tide or the day's decline than the cursed Hebrew in the
legend; when the glossy ducks swung silently, making neither ripple nor
furrow on the shimmering surface; when the fog came in with the tide and
shut out the blue above, even as the green below had been obliterated;
when boatmen lost in that fog, paddling about in a hopeless way, started
at what seemed the brushing of mermen's fingers on the boat's keel, or
shrank from the tufts of grass spreading around like the floating hair
of a corpse, and knew by these signs that they were lost upon Dedlow
Marsh and must make a night of it, and a gloomy one at that--then you
might know something of Dedlow Marsh at high water.

Let me recall a story connected with this latter view which never failed
to recur to my mind in my long gunning excursions upon Dedlow Marsh.
Although the event was briefly recorded in the county paper, I had the
story, in all its eloquent detail, from the lips of the principal actor.
I cannot hope to catch the varying emphasis and peculiar coloring of
feminine delineation, for my narrator was a woman; but I'll try to give
at least its substance.

She lived midway of the great slough of Dedlow Marsh and a good-sized
river, which debouched four miles beyond into an estuary formed by
the Pacific Ocean, on the long sandy peninsula which constituted the
southwestern boundary of a noble bay. The house in which she lived was
a small frame cabin raised from the marsh a few feet by stout piles, and
was three miles distant from the settlements upon the river. Her husband
was a logger--a profitable business in a county where the principal
occupation was the manufacture of lumber.

It was the season of early spring when her husband left on the ebb of a
high tide, with a raft of logs for the usual transportation to the lower
end of the bay. As she stood by the door of the little cabin when the
voyagers departed she noticed a cold look in the southeastern sky, and
she remembered hearing her husband say to his companions that they must
endeavor to complete their voyage before the coming of the southwesterly
gale w