BROOK MAGIC 



day crawls ashore, goes to sleep beneath 

 a stone, and in another month wakes up 

 and finds himself a Corydalis comuta, a 

 three-inch-long bug with extraordinary 

 wings and great horns, a bug that 

 might well make one of those witches, 

 met face to face on the moon's disk, 

 shriek and fall off her broomstick. If 

 he can be that thing, changed from a 

 helgramite worm, why can he not be 

 a helgramite worm, changed from the 

 water goblin which you can hear grum- 

 bling beneath the flat stone at the en- 

 trance to the pool beneath the witch- 

 hazels ? 



The answer is to be found neither in 

 the rhyme of the poet nor in the reason 

 of the scientific man. 



Musing on these things I suddenly sat 

 up from my quiet seat beneath the rock 

 ferns, for more magic yet was being dis- 

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