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While the manly man of the woods is breathing Nature like an Amreeta draught, is it anything less than the summum bonum? "Yet some call American life dull." "Ay, to dullards!" ejaculated Iglesias. Moose were said to haunt these regions. Toward midnight our would-be moose-hunter paddled about up and down, seeking them and finding not. The waters were too high. Lily-pads were drowned.
But it was a pretty pond, and never looked more innocent so the native "bard" of Rockland said in his elegy than on the morning when they found Sarah Jane and Ellen Maria floating among the lily-pads. The Apollinean Institute, or Institoot, as it was more commonly called, was, in the language of its Prospectus, a "first-class Educational Establishment."
She rounded the peninsula of The Bow and headed her boat, not to the sheds on the north shore, but towards the west, to "lily-pad reach". To get away from that woman's presence, to be alone with herself that was all she craved at the moment. The oars caught among the lily-pads; this gave her an excuse for pulling and wrenching at them.
I stood up and carefully headed my fish toward the shore, and slid his head and shoulders out on the lily-pads. One moment he lay there, glowing like mother-of-pearl, a rare fish, fresh from the sea. Then, as Attalano warily reached for the leader, he gave a gasp, a flop that deluged us with muddy water, and a lunge that spelled freedom.
When autumn came he shouldered his rifle and went out to the big swampy stretches of the upper river, where big cow moose and their ungainly young, soon to be abandoned, wallowed in the oozy bottoms of shallow ponds and lifted their heads from the water, chewing away at the dripping roots of lily-pads.
Take a day anywhere in the year: that day in March the day of the first frogs, when spring and winter meet; or that day in the fall the day of the first frost, when autumn and winter meet; or that day in August the day of the full-blown goldenrod, when summer and autumn meet these, together with the days of June, and more especially that particular day in June when you can't tell earth from heaven, when everything is life and love and song, and the very turtles of the pond are moved from their lily-pads to wander the upland slopes to lay the day when spring and summer meet!
Now there wasn't any Smiling Pool, for the very little pool left was too small and sickly-looking to smile. There were great banks of mud, out of which grew the bulrushes. The lily-pads were forlornly stretched out towards the tiny pool of water remaining. Where the banks were steep and high, the holes that Jerry Muskrat and Billy Mink knew so well were plain to see.
Sometimes he would row with frantic speed, free and joyous, through the glowing sunlight on the stream; sometimes, he would wander along the coast, questioning the sailors, chatting with the ravageurs, or junk gatherers, or stretched at full length amid the irises and tansy he would lie for hours watching the frail insects that play on the surface of the stream, water spiders, or white butterflies, dragon flies, chasing each other amid the willow leaves, or frogs asleep on the lily-pads.
I think I can see now the procession of them between the heights of Dix and Nipple Top; the elk and the moose shambling along, cropping the twigs; the heavy bear lounging by with his exploring nose; the frightened deer trembling at every twig that snapped beneath his little hoofs, intent on the lily-pads of the pond; the raccoon and the hedgehog, sidling along; and the velvet-footed panther, insouciant and conscienceless, scenting the path with a curious glow in his eye, or crouching in an overhanging tree ready to drop into the procession at the right moment.
"Come and let me show you my frog pond " and away we went along the brick paths, bordered with pots of flowers, to a tiny lake covered with lily-pads and circled by water-plants. "I did not want a greenhouse I wanted a back yard," she continued, "and I just would have it.
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