Marsh Symphony 



213 



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to their other duties. As for the town dog, its home life had 

 been such that it had no difficulties to meet, no schedule to 

 follow, no contact with roughness or unkindness, and con- 

 sequently no ability to face properly anything outside the 

 petty routine of its life. 



The other impression concerned the duckweed which had 

 so upset the dignity of the professorial pooch. A single duck- 

 weed plant is small enough to float comfortably in a thimble- 

 ful of water. And yet the sheet into which the dog had glee- 

 fully jumped was as large as a city block. So closely were the 

 plants spaced that it was the habit of the ducks, which es- 

 teem them highly, to oscillate their partly opened bills and 

 proceed through the spread at half speed, all the time "in- 

 haling" the stuff, with a noise loud enough to remind me of 

 Boy Scouts absorbing soup after a hard day in the field. 

 There must have been many hundreds of thousands of those 

 tiny bits of vegetation in each small patch. There were com- 

 paratively few species of plants in the marsh, but the con- 

 centration of duckweed and of several other species was 

 great enough to be one of the characteristics of the area. 



This impression caused me to consider the distinguishing 



