Ball BrooK 17 



are due, however, to nothing more starthng than the 

 alarum of a partridge, or the hoot of the screech-owl ; 

 or the creaking and rubbing of partially fallen trees 

 against their supporting brothers, voicing a portent 

 of coming storm. I hear in this woodland seclusion 

 little save the whispering of the winds, the sighing 

 of the pines, and snapping of dead twigs, mingled 

 with the chorus of the thrushes. The first settlers 

 here about interpreted these wood-sounds far differ- 

 ently ; then the primeval forests were dense, and the 

 noises were deep and full of mystery, and there was 

 fear of the Redman's war-whoop. As Burroughs 

 writes: "The ancients, like women and children, were 

 not accurate observers. Just at the critical moment 

 their eyes were unsteady, or their fancy, or their cred- 

 ulity, or their impatience got the better of them, so 

 that their science was half fact and half fable. . . . 

 They sought to account for such things without stop- 

 ping to ask. Are they true ? Nature was too novel, or 

 else too fearful to them to be deliberately pursued and 

 hunted down." ' 



I stopped on a corduroy bridge to draw on my high- 

 water boots and rubber gloves, for one feels safer when 

 entering this dense swamp if protected from poisonous 

 roots and foliage, biting insects and things that creep 

 and crawl. 



I had started out with small belief that I would find 

 any prime blossoms of the Orchid Family, for nothing 

 of importance had yet unfolded in Aurora's Swamp in 

 ' Burroughs, A Year in the Fields. 



