fiddler-crabs shy and sidle into their holes as you pass; here, where the
sparrows may perch upon the rim of a great hawk's nest, twist their necks,
ogle you out of countenance, and demand what business brought you to the
marsh.

I hunted round for a stone when one of them buttonholed me. He wasn't
insolent, but he was impertinent. The two hawks and the blackbirds flew
off as I came up; but the sparrows stayed. They were the only ones in
possession as I moved away; and they will be the only ones in possession
when I return. If that is next summer, then I shall find a colony of
twenty sparrow families around the hawk's nest. The purple grackles will
be gone. And the fish-hawks? Only the question of another year or so when
they, too, shall be dispossessed and gone. But where will they go to
escape the sparrows?

III

From a mile away I turned to look back at the "cripple" where towered the
tall white oak of the hawks. Both birds were wheeling about the castle
nest, their noble flight full of the freedom of the marsh, their piercing
cries voicing its wildness. And how free, how wild, how untouched by human
hands the wide plain seemed! Sea-like it lay about me, circled southward
from east to west with the rim of the sky.

I moved on toward the bay. The sun had dropped to the edge of the marsh,
its level-lined shafts splintering into golden fire against the curtained
windows of the lighthouse. It would soon be sunset. For some time there
had been a quiet gurgling and lisping down in the grass, but it had meant
nothing, until, of a sudden, I heard the rush of a wave along the beach:
the tide was coming in. And with it came a breeze, a moving, briny,
bay-cooled breeze that stirred the grass with a whisper of night.

Once more I had worked round to the road. It ran on ahead of me, up a
bushy dune, and forked, one branch leading off to the lighthouse, the
other straight out to the beach, out against the white of the breaking
waves.

The evening purple was deepening on the bay when I mounted the dune. Bands
of pink and crimson clouded the west, a thin cold wash of blue veiled the
east; and overhead, bayward, landward, everywhere, the misting and the
shadowing of the twilight.

Between me and the white wave-bars at the end of the road gleamed a patch
of silvery water--the returning tide. As I watched, a silvery streamlet
broke away and came running down the wheel track. Another streamlet,
lagging a little, ran shining