Poem OLO DO Ne B.U EE Eo iN [5 
The marsh appealed to us because it was a center of life. We set 
forth on many a dewy summer morning to explore its quaggy fastness, 
never learning its secret, but from somewhere the idea took shape 
that the marsh was a receptive thing that recognized us and had a 
sense of humor. Sometimes when we terminated the adventure by 
floundering into some murky sink-hole, it seemed that all the gleeful 
imps of the marshland were laughing at us; and long after we became 
familiar with the alarm notes of rails, it was difficult to entirely dispel 
this notion. 
We came to know the lowland intimately—its varying moods in 
sunshine or rain, the coming and going of its gawky habitues—the 
changes the seasons brought. We knew it in spring when the hyla 
chorus throbbed across the greening meadow and the colony of marsh 
marigolds splashed yellow in the very shadow of the woodland border; 
we knew it when winnowing ranks of wildfowl hurried southward 
against the rain-torn sky of autumn and the tall, bare plumes of the 
wild rice bent stiffly before the whistling ‘‘norther.”’ We heard with a 
thrill of elation the long ‘“‘Quer-ree-e-e!” of Redwings, taking up terri- 
tory in the battered, faded cat-tail sloughs of April; we watched the early 
bumble bees gathering pollen from the furry catkins of the pussy wil- 
low. And then we saw its meadows white with an airy sea of daisies, 
and delighted at the busy life that swarmed up at our approach, borne 
on the shining wings of coneheads and meadow grasshoppers; we saw 
where the showy lady slipper grew in its cloister of meadow rue. Then 
all at once it was September and gentians dotted the fen with the 
rarest and finest of all flower blues. 
We learned that the cat-tails were the best place to look for nests. 
There the Redwings and Yellowheads hung their cradles, the Long- 
billed Marsh Wren wove his globular hut, and the Bitterns fashioned 
their sturdy platforms. There in one great day, we had stumbled 
upon the floating nests of Coots and Gallinules and Black Terns, all 
with full clutches of eggs. So the summers passed, and the marsh left 
an indelible impression in our makeup, shaping the direction of our 
bent. 
But as we grew, there were long intervals of absence when the 
hazy blue line of a distant woods called more strongly. We no longer 
regarded it with the same intensity of puzzled interest; here was some- 
thing we had conquered. But it soon became evident that the old 
slough as a problem had grown too, matching our broader knowledge 
with new mysteries that dwarfed the old ones we had mastered. And 
suddenly one day it came to us that the marsh was alive—passively so, 
it is true—but in a quiet sort of way it was accomplishing a great 
many things. 
Beyond the marsh lay the quiet, picturesque lily pond, partially 
isolated from the rest of the lake, where in summers past we used to 
watch the warring bass as he threaded the maze of milfoil and bladder- 
wort. Year after year, filling outward into this open, the marsh ad- 
vanced, led by a broad front of bullrushes of the Scirpus sort—a float- 
ing bog that must eventually possess the entire lagoon. And ever on 
