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The new rushes were beginning to fringe the edges of the tiny lake, but the winter sedge stood pale and sere, and filled the air with a dry rustling. The water was as clear as a translucent gem, and Hugh saw that life was at work on the floor of the pool, sending up rich tresses of green-haired water-weed. The copse was green under foot, full of fresh, uncrumpling leaves.
And, in truth, the water, with a strange, sucking noise, disappeared through the bottom of the basin, leaving the glistening cavity which had held it, green with slimy water-weed, empty. "The time is near, indeed!" muttered the Indian. "The second shock may cause the waters from which this spring came to rise as no living man has seen them rise, and make the sea return, and the treasure be lost.
Flags and cresses framed the margins; meadowsweets made the air fragrant above, and granite bowlders fretted the waters silver, their foundations hidden in dark water-weed. Sunshine danced on every tiny cascade and threw stars and twinkling flashes of light upward from the brown pools upon the banks.
Broad streams, bordered with a heavy fringe of reed and sedge, went winding away into a green distance where woodland and meadowland seemed indefinitely prolonged; narrow streamlets, lost to view in the growth that they fostered, disclosed their presence merely by the water-weed that showed in a riband of rank verdure threading the mellower green of the fields.
The scene recalls the view from the Hudson's Bay Company's post at Lesser Slave Lake, but excels it in the larger extent of water, broken into by scores of bayous, or pools, bordered by an intensely green water-weed of uniform height, and smooth-topt as a well-clipt lawn. Behind these are hay meadows, a continuation of the long line of them we had passed coming up.
So she and her fellow brood lived in mid-aquarium, or at most rested lightly against stem or glass, suspended by gentle suction of the complex mouth. Once, when I inserted a long streamer of delicate water-weed, it remained upright, like some strange tree of carboniferous memory. After an hour I found this the perching-place of fourteen Redfin tads, and at the very summit was Guinevere.
Both before and after these gay exercises they would feed quietly in the shallows, pulling up water-weed sprouts and tender roots, or sifting insects and little shellfish from the mud by means of the sensitive tips and guttered edges of their bills.
Weyburn acted on his instinct at sight of the postillion and the chariot; he flung the window wide and shouted. Then he said, 'It is decided, and he felt the rightness of the decision, like a man who has given a condemned limb to the surgeon. Aminta was passive as a water-weed in the sway of the tide. Hearing it to be decided, she was relieved.
So he sware, and even as the Name passed his teeth, the gobbets of foam floated forth from the gate, and the water-weed writhed away with the stream, and the river flowed fair and softly, with a sound like singing. Then Martimor came back to the Mill, and told how Flumen was overcome and made to swear a pact. Thus their hearts waxed light and jolly, and they kept that day as it were a love-day.
She had a dark green smock upon her, the colour of the water-weed that waves as the water wills it, deep, deep down. And in her long wet hair were the white flowers of the water-violet, and she held a reed mace in her hand. Her face was very sad because she had lived a long life, and known so many adventures, ever since she was a baby, which was nearly a hundred years ago.
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