100 East and West 
ladder-backed, rosy-fronted fellow, barbarous 
in manner with the uncouth speech of his 
race—the untamed aboriginal race of wood- 
peckers. Occasionally there was heard the 
sibilant note of the tufted titmouse in the tree 
tops, and then again the liquid plunk of a 
dead branch or a chunk of bark falling into 
the water, and no sound better accorded with 
the swamp than this. Moccasins and water 
snakes, of which there were several species 
were awakening from the winter sleep and still 
in a semi-torpid state, so that with the paddle 
I picked them off the bank where they lay in 
the sun and tossed them into the water. Oc- 
casionally they hibernate in hollow logs. 
At the mill they told me that sometimes in 
winter the saw will rip open a log literally 
full of dormant moccasins. 
Gradually the impression arose that this 
was the appearance the earth presented be- 
fore man came upon it—the world, fitted as 
yet only for the reptile; that I was looking 
back to that formative period when the land 
was emerging from the waters; drifting in a 
primitive saurian age—slimy, reptilian, with 
no hint of man who was eventually to dom- 
inate it. Over a great part of the world man 
has become too dominant and saddens by 
