30 CHRONICLES OF A CLAY FAEM. 



shadow across your ancient domain ; little did your 

 believed security dream of so new a monster, the 

 angler upon three legs, that had measured the 

 altitude of your downfall, and caught you all, if not 

 upon one, upon two cross hairs. 



Old Fish or a JSTew Farm? Snipes or Swede-tur- 

 nips? Which was it to be? There stood but this 

 question between the will and the way to let the Dry 

 Land appear. And who knows what Saurian mon- 

 strosities of a primeval age might be brought into 

 daylight when this stagnation of waters was let loose, 

 which had dammed up the moisture of so many broad 

 acres from time immemorial? since, little raised above 

 the high-water-mark of this pool, lay the subsoil of 

 the whole farm beyond and around it ; and the lowest 

 point of this meadow was the lowest point of all.* 



* A bettor illustration could not bo given of the condition 

 of innumerable tracts of low land interspersed throughout the 

 cultivated districts of the United States. They may be found 

 containing from five, to five hundred acres, and upward, 

 and presenting to the eye all degrees of barrenness and pes- 

 tilence, from the marsh, yielding coarse grass and shrub 

 alders, to the bottomless morass dotted with pools of slimy, 

 green, stagnant waters, inhabited by obscene reptiles. So 

 that a sufficient fall can be obtained for the passage of super- 

 abundant water off - to a lower level, no obstacle need lie 



