The Pond-Meadow. 91 



thousand hues. Sometimes at the close of day, a Monarch 

 butterfly came sailing high in the air, and borne on the 

 breeze to the opposite shore. The milk-weeds there sup- 

 plied it and its progeny with food, and it finally died in 

 some far away pasture. Wandering, wandering, always 

 wandering, never perhaps returning to the same field, its 

 home and its food everywhere ; its canopy, a bending leaf. 

 Year after year the butterflies sail on just the same, the 

 meadows are as green, the melody of the marsh-wren 

 reaches from summer to summer, but a mystery clothes 

 them still. Our investigations end in a sigh; a long 

 breath tells of the hopelessness of the inquiry. 



The over-seeing power in the landscape gardening of 

 this world, has wrought on the principle of never making a 

 meadow creek conform to even the suggestion of a straight 

 line, and certainly there is nothing more winding, more 

 tortuous than a salt meadow kill. It seems unwilling to 

 leave the green meadows, and so lengthens the way; and 

 its meandering course may be followed through many turns 

 with the eye, aided by the taller plants growing on its 

 banks. This vegetation is of a different shade than the 

 sunny green meadow ; of a darker color — the upland wood 

 tint traced in serpentine patterns on the lighter green grass. 

 Even at dusk, with only a few remaining rays of light, the 

 carpet-like meadow wears a particularly vivid green, and 

 one is apt to look to westward, to make quite sure that the 

 sun has really set. The creek slumbers along between its 

 weedy banks, and is over-spread at evening with a host of 

 mysterious shadows. The drift-wood sails a long, lazy, 

 winding journey, and probably much of it never reaches 



