162 EVERYDAY ADVENTURES 
and with the finest of umber-brown traceries at the 
centre of their petals. The blues and purples may or 
may not be sweet, but one can always count on the 
faint fragrance of the white. 
We lay on the turf covering a ledge of smoky quartz 
thrust like a wedge into the marsh. Across a country 
of round green hills and fertile farms its squat bulk 
stretched unafraid, an untamed monster of another 
age. Beyond the long levels we could see Wolf 
Island, where a hunted wolf-pack, protected by quag- 
mires and trembling bogs, made its last stand two 
centuries ago. Where a fringe of trees showed the 
beginning of solid ground, a pair of hawks with long 
black-barred tails wheeled and screamed through the 
sky. “‘Geck, geck, geck, geck,”’ they called, almost 
like a flicker, except that the tone was flatter. As 
they circled, both of them showed a snowy patch over 
the rump, the field-mark of the marsh hawk. The 
male was a magnificent blue-gray bird, whose white 
under-wings were tipped with black like those of a 
herring gull. We watched them delightedly, for the 
rare nest of the marsh hawk, the only one of our 
hawks which nests on the ground, was one of the 
possibilities of the marsh. 
Suddenly we heard from behind us a sound that 
sent us crawling carefully up to the crest of the ridge. 
It was like the pouring of water out of some gigan- 
tic bottle or the gurgling suck of an old-fashioned 
pump: “‘Bloop—bloop, bloop, bloop, bloop’” — it 
came to us with a strange subterranean timbre. The 
last time I had heard that note was in the pine- 
