to their castle nest high on the top of
a tall white oak along the land edge of the marsh; in the neighborhood of
the sentinel trees a pair of crows were busy trying (it seemed to me) to
find an oyster, a crab--something big enough to choke, for just one
minute, the gobbling, gulping clamor of their infant brood. But the dear
devouring monsters could not be choked, though once or twice I thought by
their strangling cries that father crow, in sheer desperation, had brought
them oysters with the shells on. Their awful gaggings died away at dusk.
Besides the crows and fish-hawks, a harrier would now and then come
skimming close along the grass. Higher up, the turkey-buzzards circled all
day long; and once, setting my blood leaping and the fish-hawks screaming,
there sailed over, far away in the blue, a bald-headed eagle, his snowy
neck and tail flashing in the sunlight as he careened among the clouds.

In its blended greens the marsh that morning offered one of the most
satisfying drinks of color my eyes ever tasted. The areas of different
grasses were often acres in extent, so that the tints, shading from the
lightest pea-green of the thinner sedges to the blue-green of the rushes,
to the deep emerald-green of the hay-grass, merged across their broad
bands into perfect harmony.

As fresh and vital as the color was the breath of the marsh. There is no
bank of violets stealing and giving half so sweet an odor to my nostrils,
outraged by a winter of city smells, as the salty, spray-laden breath of
the marsh. It seems fairly to line the lungs with ozone. I know how
grass-fed cattle feel at the smell of salt. I have the concentrated thirst
of a whole herd when I catch that first whiff of the marshes after a
winter, a year it may be, of unsalted inland air. The smell of it
stampedes me. I gallop to meet it, and drink, drink, drink deep of it, my
blood running redder with every draught.

II

I had waded out into the meadow perhaps two hundred yards, leaving a dark
bruised trail in the grass, when I came upon a nest of the long-billed
marsh-wren. It was a bulky house, and so overburdened its frail sedge
supports that it lay almost upon the ground, with its little round doorway
wide open to the sun and rain. They must have been a young couple who
built it, and quite inexperienced. I wonder they had not abandoned it;
for a crack of light into a wren's nest would certainly addle the eggs.
They are such tiny, dusky, tucked-away