The Music of the Marsh 



ground is almost invariably graceful flowers, dark- 

 green cattail leaves, and the golden-green, round, 

 aspiring stems of the bulrush. These are genuine 

 pointers; they are the signboards of earth direct- 

 ing man toward heaven. Water shallow enough 

 to grow these lilies always shows the black muck 

 of its bed, and this further emphasizes their ap- 

 pearance of purity. Worship is their due, and 

 they receive it; for no mortal with senses alive 

 to beauty can see them without having the joy 

 song awakened in its most holy form in the 

 heart. 



Around them flit the sweet-lovers of the marsh 

 with music-breeding wings, and in pursuit, equally 

 musical, the dragon fly. At their feet the water 

 folk are busy with the affairs of life, and among 

 the lilies and between their slender stems dart the 

 chattering grebes. 



These small musicians can be shrill of voice 

 and active with their bills in the fright of captiv- 

 ity; but at home in the marsh, filled with domestic The 

 solicitude, they make their location charming with 

 sweet, tender, low-voiced cheepings and chatter as 

 they dart around, caring for their young. Grebe 

 babies will thrill any normal human heart with 

 tenderness. For a nest the mothers pull weeds 

 from the marsh bed and stack them on a bit of 

 morass, a grassy tuft, or drift-covered brush. 

 They cover their eggs on leaving them, and when 

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