The sun had gone down behind the hill; the flame had faded from the sky, and over the rim of the circling slopes poured the soft, cool twilight, with a breeze as soft and cool, and a spirit that was prayer. Drifting across the pond as gently as the gray half-light fell a shower of lint from the willow catkins. The swallows had left; but from the leafy darkness of the copse in front of me, piercing the dreamy, foamy roar of the distant dam, came the notes of a wood-thrush, pure, sweet, and peaceful, speaking the soul of the quiet time. My boat grated softly on the sandy bottom of the cove and swung in. Out from the deep shadow of the wooded shore, out over the pond, a thin white veil was creeping—the mist, the breath of the sleeping water, the spirit of the stream. And away up the creek a distorted, inarticulate sound—the hoarse, guttural croak of the great blue heron, the weird, uncanny cry of the night, the mock, the menace of the tangled, untamed swamp!
THE DRAGON OF THE SWALE
My path to Cubby Hollow ran along a tumbling worm-fence, down a gravelly slope, and across a strip of swale, through which flowed the stream that farther on widened into the Hollow. A small jungle of dog-roses, elder, and blackberry tangled the banks of the stream, spreading into flanks of cinnamon-fern that crept well up the hillsides.
As I descended the gravelly slope, my path led through the ferns into a tunnel of vines, to a rail over the water, and on up to the woods. By the middle of June the tangle, except by the half-broken path, was almost rabbit-proof. The rank ferns waved to my chin, and were so thick that they left little trace of my passing until late in the summer.
This bit of the swale from the lower edge of the gravelly slope to the edge of the woods on the opposite slope was the lair of a dragon. My path cut directly across it.
Perhaps the dragon had been there ever since I had known the swale, and summer after summer had allowed me to cross unchallenged. I do not know. I only know that one day he rose out of the ferns before me—the longest, ugliest, boldest beast that ever withstood me in the quiet walks about home.
It was a day in early July, hot and very close. I was wading the sunken trail, much as one "treads water," my head not always above the surface of the fronds, when, suddenly, close to my side the ferns in a single spot were violently shaken. Instantly ahead of me they whirled again' and before I could think, off across the path was another rush and whirl—then stirless silence.