He is a clumsy and stupid lout, this Caliban whom some people call the lubber grasshopper; the very dolt of his class. He is huge, longer than a man’s finger and bigger than his thumb, and he has ridiculous short wings that I am sure he cannot use. They are beautifully mottled and gauzy with pinkish shadows, these wings, and seem as much out of place as those of the loveliest tiny fairy of the Christmas pantomime would on a pig. He moves his greenish-yellow body as slowly as Caliban did his when going sulkily to his heaviest task and Trinculo and his fellow must needs be very drunk indeed before they would sleep beneath the same cloak with him. On first seeing the lubber grasshopper I wondered that anything so fat and clumsy should continue to exist in a country swarming with insect-eating birds, but even the barnyard fowls will have none of him. At the start on this morning of gold born of white frost my path led me down the river bank under arching live-oaks. All to northward the pearl river was of glass that softened and melted into a blue haze where, miles beyond, the farther bank hung as indistinct and unreal as a dream, an illusion through which glided a white phantom of a turpentine steamer, kicking up frothing hills of water behind it, a sea-serpentlike line of humps whose head was the great stern wheel. There is a quiet and solemnity in these high-vaulted paths beneath the river oaks that seems to withdraw on the one hand from the witchery of the pine forest and the glamour of the river on the other. Something of the England of the middle ages seems to have drifted over seas and down the years to this spot. A monastery should be just beyond, and, though perhaps he does not know it, Jones, the postmaster, traversed monastic aisles as he walked his mile this morning to the tiny post office. Far beyond in the open beneath the big pines I hear blue jays blowing clarion calls of challenge to the lists and the tramp of hoofs as knights in armor ride the winding paths to be present at the tourney. There are days down here when I know the charging hoofs to be those of razorbacks scuttling through the underbrush and the amble of palfreys is but that of half wild cattle going down to feed in the river flats, but not on a morning like this. The gold haze of stillness after frost has put a spell upon all things.