Earl H. Reed

“ Near the roots of a gnarled oak at a bend in the stream Peg Leg’s dust has mingled with the black loam, where his spirit may be lulled by the passing waters. When we seem to hear the tapping of the woodpecker on a hidden hollow tree in the depths of the dark ravine, it may be the echoes through the mists of the years of the strokes of the poor old trapper on the timbers of the bridge.
The red man has gone. The currents of human passion that rose and fell along the banks of the little stream have passed into silence. ”

“ When the first gray tones of light appear, the night-prowlers seek seclusion, and the stillness is broken by the crows. A single note is heard from among the boughs of a far-off pine, and in a few moments the air is filled with the noisy conversation of these interesting birds—mingled with the cries of the gulls and terns, which have come in from the lake and are searching for the refuse of the night waves. The beams of a great light burst through the trees—the leaves and the sands are touched with gold—and the awakening of the hills has come. ”

“ We wander in a maze of speculative thought. The paths are intricate and only lead to narrow cells. The Forest Gods that dwell in the high and hidden places speak a 72 language that is without words. The fallen leaf is as eloquent as established dogma or voice of hoary seer. In our own hearts must we find our shrines, for the obscurity beyond the borderland of philosophy is as deep as the mould below the leaves. The multitudes that have come upon the earth and vanished have left no clue.
The key lies at the bottom of the tarn, and the story is in the marsh. ”

“ Time finally bent the sinewy form, the springing strides became shorter, and their vigor became less. The frosts and sorrows of many winters had turned the dark locks white, when, at the end of one summer—just as the first leaves began to fall—he once more journeyed to the high rock to invoke the aid and counsel of the hero god.
His dimmed eyes once more sought the star, and when he saw its light, he told Manabush the story of his fruitless quest. His tired limbs could no longer keep the trail, and his weary arms could no longer bend the bow to the arrow’s length. ”

“ It was nearly midnight when I approached the tower on my way back. Many times during my visits the thought had occurred to me that it was an ideal habitation for a ghost. The maze of timbers, water pipes, wires, and open winding stairways that led up to various landings in the successive octagonal rooms, on the way to the upper chamber of the tall edifice, seemed to provide a perfect environment for a discriminating specter. ”

“ It faded away in the gray of the morning and its watcher followed the steep trail down the side of Wud-ju-na-gow to rest.
Wa-be-no-je’s silent departure from the world left hardly a ripple in the marsh. It is human to cherish the hope, or fondly believe, that some store of gold, or grandeur of achievement—some sculptured monument, or service to mankind—will stand at our place of exit and be eloquent while the ages last, but the Waters of Oblivion hide well their secrets. Beneath them are neither pride nor vanity. ”

“ Old piles and floating objects in the lake have an added interest with his trim figure perched upon them. The perched birds seem magnified and ghostly when one comes suddenly upon them in{41} the fog and they disappear with shrill cries into the mists.
There is no gleam of human interest in the eye of a gull. It is fierce, cold, and utterly wild. The birds we love most are those that nest in the land in which we live. The home is the real bond among living things, and our feathered friends creep easily into our affections when we can hear their love songs and watch their home life. ”

“ Many millions have gone forth from this great financial center that have webbed the map of our country with railway lines, encircled its sea borders with prosperous docks, established mammoth industrial enterprises, erected and endowed universities, libraries and benevolent institutions, founded innumerable charities and movements for the investigation and control of disease, and done hundreds of other things that humanity would never have done for itself without the initiative of individuals with power to give form and effect to ideas for the good of mankind. ”

“ THE MOON IN THE MARSH There is a hazy mist on the horizon where the red rim of the October sun left the sky-line. The twilight of Indian Summer is stealing over the marsh. There is a hush of vibrant voices and a muffled movement of tiny life in the darkened places. Sorrow rests upon the world, for the time of the requiem of the leaves has come. The red arrows are abroad; a flush of crimson is creeping through the forest. An elusive fragrance of fruition is in the air, and a drowsy languor droops the stems and branches. ”

“ Much of the mysterious lure of the dunes is in the magnificent sweep of the great lake along the wild shores. Its restless waters are the complement of the indolent sands. The distant bands of deep blue and green, dappled with dancing white-caps, in the vistas through the openings, impart vivid color accents to the grays and neutral tones of the foregrounds.
No great mind has ever flowered to its fullness that was insensible to the allurements of a large body of water. It may be likened to a human soul. ”

“ We spent much of our time in the sub-treasury and bank vaults watching new shades vainly clutching at the money stacks with their pale fingers.
“The insane strife of the hordes of mortals to see who can die beside the biggest gold pile has always been considered a rich joke in the spirit world, for when they come among us they are unable to bring any of it with them. The accumulation in the sub-treasury is very convenient for them to gloat over and it continues their worldly illusions perfectly. ”

“ I felt again the haunting mystery that is over the marsh, along the river through the silent nights, and in its fecund depths, where pearls are wrought among hidden eddies.
Under the gently moving water was the dreamland of the reflections. The dark forests and the ghostly dunes hung low in the realm of unreality. Beyond them the Pleiades and Orion glowed softly in the limitless abyss that held the endless story of the stars.
The Ego, mocking the Infinite with puny dogma, in its minute orbit—a speck between two eternities—recoils in terror from the void beyond the world. ”

“ The transient winged tribes, that come and go—like ships on the sea—and rear their young in other lands, arouse our poetic reflections, challenge our admiration, and excite our love of the beautiful. They delight our eyes but not our hearts.
The graceful forms of the gulls give an ethereal note of exaltation to the spirit of the landscape—a suggestion of the Infinite—as they soar in long curves in the azure blue, or against the dark clouds that roll up in portentous masses from the distant horizon and sweep across the heavens over the great lake. ”

“ Conservation, utility, efficiency and economy are the watchwords of the day, and, while the cry of Teach’s parrot from the bloody deck of his pirate ship—“Pieces-of-Eight!—Pieces-of-Eight!”—may be echoed now and then within the shadow of Trinity’s spire, we who are alive and in the enjoyment of rational mentality, know that there are a great many things in that neighborhood that are entitled to our profound admiration. ”

“ With steam shovels and freight cars he would level the undulating hills, and haul away their shining sands to a world of greed, where man does not discriminate. The wild life would flee from steam whistles that shrieked through the forests, and from smoke that defiled the quiet places. Belching chimneys and unsightly signs would befoul and deface the fair domain. With the beauty of the dunes he would feed a Moloch in the sordid town.
The peaceful marsh, and the river with its channel of silver light, would be invaded with dredges. ”

“ In years of obscure legend, birch-bark canoes{34} were drawn out on the gleaming beach by red men who carried weapons of stone. They hunted and fought among the yellow hills. They saw them basking under summer suns, and swept by the furies of winter storms. From their tops they watched the dying glories of the afterglows in the western skies. They saw the great lake shimmer in still airs, and heard the pounding of remorseless waters in its sterner moods. They who carried the weapons of stone are gone, and time has hidden them in the silence of the past. ”

“ Of course we cannot argue with a ghost, any more than we can convince a deceased writer that he was wrong, but we may always combat what we believe to be fallacy, whether its author is in existence or not.
The old robber baron lived and died in a sphere of life that gave him an unhealthy and morbid point of view and it seems natural that such a mental attitude should be in some way reflected in his spiritual state. Through him we have a shadowy expression of archaic ideas and obsolete conceptions of the mission and ideals of mankind. ”

“ The dark morass becomes a dreamland. Through it stately legions go. Ethereal aisles wind through the trees. Cloudy walls rise along its borders, and beyond them are kingdoms in elf-land where fancy may spin fabrics of gossamer and build mansions remote from earthly being.
There is a life of the soul as well as of the body. We may ponder as to its immortality, but undeniably it is in the present, if not in a state to come. Hope grasps at a shadowy vision of the future that dissolves at our touch. Reason gives only the substance of the present, elusive though it be. ”

“ The blue immensity of the lake glistens, and is flecked with foam. White plumes are tossing and waving along the sky-line. In the foreground little groups of sandpipers are running nimbly along the edges of the incoming waves, racing after them as they retreat, and lightly taking wing when they come too near. There are flocks of stately gulls, balancing themselves with set wings, high in the wind, and a few terns are skimming along the crests. The gray figures of two or three herons are stalking about, with much dignity, near some driftwood that dots the dry sand farther up the shore. ”

“ After our triumph over Ali Bey we had no serious trouble with the Turks for some time, but one night when I was asleep in my tower a bloody gang of these dogs came and I was hacked into pieces with a dozen scimitars. It is the custom of spirits to wear a semblance of their earthly apparel at the time of passing into the immaterial sphere—merely as a recognition of absurd human conventions—and that accounts for what appears to you to be a night cap on my head. ”

“ It glorifies dull winter landscapes with skies of infinite hues, and glances from twisted trunks of ancient pines on hills that defy the storms. It pulsates in star reflections that haunt the margins of wet 22 sands, and where crescent moons touch the waves that toss on night horizons. Its tinge is in the tender leaves and petals of the springtime, and in the flush of autumn’s robes. We see its elusive tints through vistas in the dusk, and in the purple mystery that fills the shadowy places, for the Dream Jewel is Beauty, and they who know not its holy light must walk in darkness. ”

“ When the storm gods lash the lake with whistling winds, and send their sullen dark array through the skies, and the music of the tempest blends with song of the surges on the shore, the color tones seem to become vocal and to mingle their cadences with the voices of the gale.
We may look from the higher dune tops upon panoramas of surpassing splendor. There are piles on piles of sandy hills, accented with green{32} masses and solitary pines. These highways of the winds and storms, with their glittering crowns and shadowy defiles, sweep into dim perspective. ”

“ Somewhere far out on the wind-lashed lake the turbulent seas and the storm played with a thing that had become a part of the waste and débris of the wide waters. Bascom’s god was in his leather wallet, but it was powerless, except with men. The winds and the waves knew it not. Greed, that dominates the greater part of mankind, becomes ghastly illusion, as the frail creature it disfigures blends into the elements when finality comes. ”

“ A wild duck hurries her downy young into the thick grasses—a few turtles tumble hastily from the bogs into the water—a large blue heron rises slowly out of an unseen retreat, and trails his long{269} legs after him in rhythmic flight down the marsh—mysterious wings are heard among the rushes—immense flocks of blackbirds fill the air—there is a splash out among the lily pads, where a hungry fish has captured his unsuspecting prey, and the deep sonorous bass of a philosophic bullfrog resounds from concealed recesses. ”

“ Countless tiny rivulets of transparent golden brown creep through the low land among the underbrush and mingle with the gentle current that whispers in the deep grasses, ripples against decayed branches and fallen trunks, hides under masses of gnarled roots and projecting banks, and enters the long sinuous ravine that winds through the woods and sand-hills. The ravine ends abruptly at the broad shore of the lake. The stream spreads out over the beach and tints the incoming surf with wondrous hues. ”

“ Nature has begrudgingly yielded a scanty livelihood to the brave and simple ones who have spent their youth and middle age in wresting away the barriers which have stood between them and the comforts of life. The broken-spirited animals that stand still, with lowered heads, in the little fields and around the barn, are mute testimonies of the years of drudgery and hardship.{200}
On approaching the house we encounter a few ducks that splash into the ditch along the muddy road, and disappear in great trepidation among the weeds and bulrushes beyond the fence. ”

“ He may have seen himself worshipped, not for his achievement, but for his wealth, in the domain of Vulgaria, where Avarice is king—where worth is measured by dollars—where utter selfishness rules, and the cave man still dwells, veneered with a gilded tinsel of what, in his foolish pride, he thinks is civilization—where vanity parades in the guise of charity—where cruelty and greed hide under fine raiment—where human hyenas rend the weak and grovel before the strong—where the bestiality of the Hun darkens the world—where the only god is Gold, and where the idealist must fight or perish. ”