For the beautiful Mrs. Goose was heading straight for the swamp at the foot of the great pasture, and already she was taking them through the tufted grass and the low bushes, through which they could not easily descry her stately form. They were quite out of breath, and bore along behind her, being very careful to keep exactly in her foot-prints.
"We are going to the great salt river, and the marshes," she called back to them. "That is where your cousins live and we shall spend a lovely day with them. But we must hurry through these bushes. I never feel safe until I am well out of them."
She explained no more than this, for she was a bird well versed in the bringing up of children, and she did not wish to frighten them. But, truth to tell, this bushy part of the path to her favorite haunts was always full of its terrors for her.
"It looks so very much like the spot where my first husband was attacked by a fox," she confided to one of her friends. "He was never seen again, of course, and although I was not long a widow, still I have never been consoled for his taking off."
Naturally, then, she had for the rest of her days a distrust of bushy paths, and it was with a great quack of relief that she emerged with all her little ones on the banks of the deep, narrow stream which was a part of the great marsh.
Off she swam on the water, paddling with a majestic ease, and down they hopped and splashed and paddled beside her, the seven of them, highly excited over the prospect of a day's adventure.
The stream was narrow and deep, much unlike the shallow duck-pond in the farmyard, and it gave the goslings an exhilarating sensation to be thus abroad on a real stream.
"How good it is," Mrs. Goose quacked, "to feel the clear, cool water, and to know that you are not paddling across a mere mud-puddle!
"And there are no tin cans and other rubbish here," she went on. "Very different, all this, from the rather common surroundings of the duck-pond. You must realize that your family is a superior one, and that while the ducks on the farm do very well for neighbors, they are not the aristocrats that we are. And I am taking you purposely, my children, to visit my most exclusive friends."
The old goose was indeed a haughty personage, as any one could tell by the way she held her head. For she swam as a soldier marches, with eyes to the front and a splendid air.