That matter is no more to be taken seriously than is the old-time Yankee query-
How much wood would a woodchuck chuck,
If a woodchuck would chuck wood?
which seems to me to emphasize the whole popular conception of the animal. Of all the common New England animals he is the one taken least seriously. Even if he does eat up all our summer garden we are apt to grin as we bear it; or if we do go out and "get" him, we do it with a forgiving, pitying smile.
CHAPTER XII
ALONG THE SALT MARSHES
When the wind is east Sumner's Islands seems to tug at its moorings like a cruiser swinging at a short hawser in the shelter of Stony beach. If you will stand on the tip of its gray rock prow and face the sea it is hard not to feel the rise and fall of surges under you, and in fancy you have one ear cocked for the boatswain's whistle and the call to the watch to bear a hand and get the anchor aboard. Just a moment and you will feel the pulse of the screw, hear the clink-clank of shovels and slice-bars, tinkling faintly up the ventilator; one bell will sound in the engine room and under slowest speed she will fall away from the sheltering beach, round the fragrant greenery of the Glades rocks and, free from their buttressing, prance exultantly to four bells and a jingle out into the surgent tumult of the roaring sea. Wow! but the fancy sets your blood to bubbling and your pulse to swinging in rhythm with the long surges that leap about Minot's and froth white over Chest ledge and the Willies, that come on to drown the inner Osher rocks in exultant whirlpools and fluff the loose stones of the beach into a foam that ripples over the breakwater into the road that snuggles behind it.
But that is when the wind is east and really blows, when November has stripped the oak and hickory upper works of the cruiser bare of leaves and she stands grim in her gray war-paint, ready for the winter's battles. Now she is gay in summer greenery and many a string of flower signals flutters from mast head and signal yard. You must go astern to get the wind in your face, for now it sings gently in from the west across a mile of salt marsh, pools of imprisoned tide where night-herons feed and tiny crabs and cobblers scurry to shelter beneath the mud at the jar of your footfall, winding creeks that twice a day brim with silver water, and levels of quivering marsh grass, to Cohasset harbor and the green hillsides of the Jerusalem road.
The island is an island by courtesy only at this time of year, aground in the green marsh. The bashful tides of summer yearn shyly toward it, and twice every twenty-four hours stretch soft white arms up the creeks from Cohasset harbor to the east and the west and fondle it. They hold it close at the hour of flood, but hand does not clasp hand about it, and the dry sand that links it to the beach and the breakwater is not wet. When the autumn winds shall come and the sea shakes itself out of its summer lethargy and asserts its power and will not be denied, it is different. At such times it roars over the beach and the breakwater and drowns the white sands that have kept the hands of its summer tides apart. It marches deep green up Cohasset harbor and brims the slender creeks. It passes their limits at a leap, and swirls in defiant, dogged depths over the drowned marshes. Then the island is an island in very truth, and the sea takes his love upon his broad bosom and rocks it, not always so tenderly. No man can guess the power of the floods and the deep sea currents herded by an easterly gale till he has seen the leaping of the flood tide at such a time.
Now it is a time of July gentleness and fripperies of color. The salt marsh, to be sure, never lacks these, even in the dead of winter, when high tides continually load it with sea ice, and then receding leave it piled with fantastic hummocks and pressure ridges like the Arctic sea. It has gleams of emerald and azure welling from its hummocks under gray skies. The tattered crimson of windy sunsets gets tangled in its floes and flutters in ragged beauty, and it treasures the sun's gold in the dusk of still evenings. Spring tints it with soft graygreens and autumn seems to use it for a mixing pot for the coloring of the October woods. All their flame and gold are there, toned to soft warm browns and tender olives just flecked with crimson and with yellow flame.