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Down by the flats, where the tiny creek widened to a miniature swamp and emptied its placid waters into the main stream, the red-wing blackbirds sounded their strange cry among the cat-tails and the bull-rushes; the frogs croaked in ceaseless and reverberant chorus; the catfish were ever hungry after dark, and the night was broken by the glare of torches along the little bridge or in a group of boats where fisher-lads kept close watch upon their corks.
All the morning we travelled west, the trees ever drawing closer as our water departed on the south, running through the willows, arrow-weed, and cat-tails. Then the channel opened into Volcanic Lake, a circular body of water, which is not a lake but simply a gathering together of the streams we had been losing, and here the water stands, depositing its mud.
If he had, no doubt he would have left the muskrat's house at once and moved on to some other neighborhood. Early the next morning Johnnie Green put the old gun on his shoulder and stole down to the edge of the duck pond, where he hid among some cat-tails. He kept his sharp eyes on the bank of the pond, for the ducks were just waddling down from the barnyard, to enjoy their morning swim.
But for me it was a wonderful and unexpected experience to thus suddenly come into a knowledge of the aspect of the sea and sky in the midst of the South Pacific Ocean, at a given time in a year long past. . . . Oh! for a glimpse of that beautiful and tranquil sea, of those "cat-tails" that dotted the deep blue arch of the sky, and of those dolphins that swiftly traversed the lonely southern waters!
"Not with a fire and I may have a lamp, I suppose?" At his question Patsey appeared with an armful of resinous pine, and a few minutes later, a cheerful blaze was chasing the shadows up the great brick chimney. When Molly returned with the brandy, Gay was leaning against the mantelpiece idly burning a bunch of dried cat-tails he had taken from a blue-and-white china vase.
But Twinkle-tail had always stayed in the cat-tails and watched, and if the boy and girl came to his side of the pond, then a lightning twinkle of his tail was all that told them that he had scooted out of the pool and down into the stream. Once the girl had trailed a piece of flashing red flannel across the water, and Twinkle-tail could not resist. He leaped for it.
Above the mill-dam the water backs up to form a peaceful pond which mirrors the trees and the rushes and cat-tails above it and sleeps beneath the thicket of willows where the redwings flock in the evenings.
For a long time, and for a tremendous distance as it seemed to Bobby they crept along through the lagoons and channels of the marshes. The dawn had not come yet, but the air was getting grayer in anticipation of it, and the wind began to blow faintly from the direction of the Lake. Bobby could see the shapes of the grasses and cat-tails, and make out the bodies of water through which they passed.
To-day this bridge was, like the grades, like the trees and the meadows furred over with opalescent, feathery frost. And the dam over which I am driving now! This dam that erstwhile was a very blasphemy, an obscenity flung on the marshy meadows with their reeds, their cat-tails, and their wide-leaved swamp-dock clusters!
The other tradition is that the significant features of all villages are whiskers, iron dogs upon lawns, gold bricks, checkers, jars of gilded cat-tails, and shrewd comic old men who are known as "hicks" and who ejaculate "Waal I swan."
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