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Side 89 av 112
It was through this unharvested ice-pond, this fallow field of
water, that my lady Graygown and I entered on acquaintance with our
lazy, idle brook. We had a house, that summer, a few miles down the
bay. But it was a very small house, and the room that we like best
was out of doors. So we spent much time in a sailboat,--by name
"The Patience,"--making voyages of exploration into watery corners
and byways. Sailing past the wooden bridge one day, when a strong
east wind had made a very low tide, we observed the water flowing
out beneath the road with an eddying current. We were interested to
discover where such a stream came from. But the sailboat could not
go under the bridge, nor even make a landing on the shore without
risk of getting aground. The next day we came back in a rowboat to
follow the clue of curiosity. The tide was high now, and we passed
with the reversed current under the bridge, almost bumping our heads
against the timbers. Emerging upon the pond, we rowed across its
shallow, weed-encumbered waters, and were introduced without
ceremony to one of the most agreeable brooks that we had ever met.
It was quite broad where it came into the pond,--a hundred feet from
side to side,--bordered with flags and rushes and feathery meadow
grasses. The real channel meandered in sweeping curves from bank to
bank, and the water, except in the swifter current, was filled with
an amazing quantity of some aquatic moss. The woods came straggling
down on either shore. There were fallen trees in the stream here
and there. On one of the points an old swamp-maple, with its
decrepit branches and its leaves already touched with the hectic
colours of decay, hung far out over the water which was undermining
it, looking and leaning downward, like an aged man who bends, half-
sadly and half-willingly, towards the grave.
But for the most part the brook lay wide open to the sky, and the
tide, rising and sinking somewhat irregularly in the pond below,
made curious alternations in its depth and in the swiftness of its
current. For about half a mile we navigated this lazy little river,
and then we found that rowing would carry us no farther, for we came
to a place where the stream issued with a livelier flood from an
archway in a thicket.
This woodland portal was not more than four feet wide, and the
branches of the small trees were closely interwoven overhead. We
shipped the oars and took one of them for a paddle. Stooping down,
we pushed the boat through the archway and found ourselves in the
Fairy Dell. It was a long, narrow bower, perhaps four hundred feet
from end to end, with the brook dancing through it in a joyous,
musical flow over a bed of clean yellow sand and white pebbles.
There were deep places in the curves where you could hardly touch
bottom with an oar, and shallow places in the straight runs where
the boat would barely float. Not a ray of unbroken sunlight leaked
through the green roof of this winding corridor; and all along the
sides there were delicate mosses and tall ferns and wildwood flowers
that love the shade.
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