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Then catching those that could be caught, and driving those that had to be driven, they laid hold of a few of the green-headed ducks, variegated marsh-birds and coloured mandarin-ducks, and tying their wings they let them loose in the court to disport themselves. Closing the court Hsi Jen and her playmates stood together under the verandah and enjoyed the fun.
The rocks of the Spy-glass re-echoed it a score of times; the whole troop of marsh-birds rose again, darkening heaven, with a simultaneous whirr; and long after that death-yell was still ringing in my brain silence had re-established its empire, and only the rustle of the re-descending birds and the boom of the distant surges disturbed the languor of the afternoon.
Had he weighed the matter in the gloom of night, or even in a dull and stormy hour, perhaps nay probably he would have decided otherwise. But this morning the sun shone brightly, the wind made a merry music in the reeds; on the rippling surface of the lake the marsh-birds sang, and from the shore came a cheerful lowing of kine. In such surroundings his fears and superstitions vanished.
The creek that wound through them was a ribbon of intense blue, and a thousand marsh-birds twittered and darted and swooped over its surface. But the two girls were, for once, almost blind to the beauty of it all, so absorbed were they in the never-failing topic of their mystery. And the village was reached almost before they realized they were in its vicinity.
And the Kouan-yao, which are the Porcelains of Magistrates, and third in rank of merit among all wondrous porcelains, colored with colors of the morning, skyey blueness, with the rose of a great dawn blushing and bursting through it, and long-limbed marsh-birds flying against the glow;
"Well, sir," replied my good master, "I am in no way angry that winged frogs are living on the moon; such kind of marsh-birds are very worthy inhabitants of a world which has not been sanctified by the blood of our Lord Jesus Christ.
"It's chock full of pretty bits, and then you keep coming out on the lagoon again, and like as not there are marsh-birds or people wading about after shell-fish. There's always something going on on the lagoons." "Why, I should have said that the lagoon was the quietest place in the world," Pauline remarked. "It is," Uncle Dan admitted.
His shooting was of the woodcock, the wild-duck, and the various marsh-birds that frequent the coast of New England.... Nor would he unmoor his dory with his 'bob and line and sinker, for a haul of cod or hake or haddock, without having Ovid, or Agricola, or Pharsalia, in the pocket of his old gray overcoat, for the 'still and silent hour' upon the deep."
Hale felt it as he stepped into the soft night air; he heard it in the piping of frogs "Marsh-birds," as he always called them; he could almost see it in the flying clouds and the moonlight and even the bare trees seemed tremulously expectant. An indefinable happiness seemed to pervade the whole earth and Hale stretched his arms lazily.
The rocks of the Spy-glass re-echoed it a score of times; the whole troop of marsh-birds rose again, darkening heaven, with a simultaneous whirr; and long after that death yell was still ringing in my brain, silence had re-established its empire, and only the rustle of the redescending birds and the boom of the distant surges disturbed the languor of the afternoon.
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