i 



MY OWN ACRE 



Nature conscious and astir as no single curve 

 or straight line can. 



I admit that even among amateurs this is 

 rather small talk, but it brings me to this point: 

 in the passage of water down a ravine of its own 

 making, this line of Nature astir may repeat 

 itself again and again but is commonly too in- 

 affable, abrupt, angular, to suggest the ogee. 

 In that middle part of it where the descent is 

 swift it may be more or less of a plunge, and 

 after the plunge the water is likely to pause on 

 the third turn, in a natural pool, before resuming 

 its triple action again. And so, in my ravine, 

 some seasons later, I ventured to detain the over- 

 flow of my first pool on a second and a third 

 lingering place, augmenting the water supply by 

 new springs developed in the bottoms of the 

 new pools. The second pool has a surface of a 

 thousand square feet, the third spans nineteen 

 hundred, and there are fish in all three, hatched 

 there "pumpkin -seed" included, but also trout 

 among spontaneous bulrushes, pond-lilies, 

 flags, and dainty water-weeds; and sometimes at 

 night, when the reflected glory of a ten-o'clock 



19 



