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The next moment he was in the saddle and racing over the grassland in the direction of the village. The trail declined over a long, gradual slope. At the bottom of it was a broad, almost dried-out slough. A wooden culvert spanned the reed-grown watercourse.
A thin film of ice bordered the flat reed-grown lake. At the corner of the pine-wood he caught sight of Sir Geoffrey Clouston, the Duchess's brother, jerking two spent cartridges out of his gun. He jumped from the cart, and having told the groom to take the mare home, made his way towards his guest through the withered bracken and rough undergrowth. "Have you had good sport, Geoffrey?" he asked.
Watkins itself, despite its name, is sufficiently favoured by Nature to make an easy annual living, situated as it is at the south end of the beautiful Seneca Lake, and at the head of a nobly picturesque valley some twenty miles long, with a pretty river spreading out into flashing reed-grown flats, sheer cliffs and minor waterfalls, here and there a vineyard on the hillside, or the vivid green of celery trenches in the dark loam of the hollows, all the way to Elmira!
The few lakes of the interior are great "sinks," or marshes, much like Humboldt Sink, in Nevada. They are shallow, reed-grown, and briny, and they are bordered by mud flats and quicksands between which there is little to choose. An unfortunate victim will sink in the one quite as quickly as in the other. But even the lakes are gradually going the way of all lakes.
The ancient red-brick pile rises out of its reed-grown moat with that air of mystery which age and seeming neglect only can impart. Coming upon it unexpectedly, especially towards dusk, one is struck with the strange, dignified melancholy pervading it.
Ahead of it, across the little reed-grown inlet, stretched their road of escape, a long wooden bridge, lying white in the moonlight. "I don't see a soul," whispered Miss Forbes. "Anybody at that draw?" asked Winthrop. Unconsciously his voice also had sunk to a whisper. "No," returned Fred. "I think the man that tends the draw goes home at night; there is no light there."
Only he, and the squat figures of Shaunekuk paddlers were to be seen. For the rest nothing was visible to the onlookers. As the canoe grounded on the reed-grown mud the doctor's deep-voiced "Thank God!" met with no response. The wild-looking figure scrambled off the boat, and plunged nearly knee-deep into the mud.
Behind him was a great cut-faced rock of ironstone that certainly looked auriferous. The base of it lay in a definite hollow, reed-grown and oozy. Beyond him, to the right, following the river bank, the ground declined gradually towards a black-looking, turgid and overgrown swamp.
She, too, with the exercise of riding through the night-air, and the company of a handsome, agreeable, well-bred man, began to have a lurking idea that she had been making a fool of herself; when they came suddenly on a hut, dark, cheerless, deserted, standing above a black, stagnant, reed-grown waterhole. The hut where Frank had gone to preach to the stockmen.
Another such wayside meal and another old couple live touchingly in our memories. We were still in the broad, sun-swept valley of the Genesee, our road lying along the edge of the wide, reed-grown flats and water-meadows, bounded on the north by rolling hills.
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