It was so with Posey. As her heart grew light she began to feel the brightness and charm of the sunny October morning, a late lingering robin whose note when she first heard it a little while before she had thought sad and sorrowful, now had a cheery sound; and the call of a flock of blackbirds flying over she thought most musical. Even the swamp, which had looked to her so dismal, as she rode through it was transformed and became full of delights. Its thick crowding bushes gleamed with coral-hued berries, its tangled depths were rich with every tone of tint or color, and through the centre a little river, set thick with lily pads, loitered along with the laziest possible current. Not a few of the trees and shrubs which bordered the narrow roadway, made, as Ben explained, by filling in earth through the swamp—were draped with festoons of wild clematis vines in their autumn beauty, set with fluffy masses of filmy, smoke-hued fringe. From her high seat Posey reached out and pulled lengths of this, which she twined about the dashboard, exclaiming with delight at its delicate beauty. A few wild roses were still in blossom on the thickets, whose gleaming red hips hinted at a wealth of earlier bloom, and here and there the scarlet leaves of the poison ivy added their vivid hue to the wealth of color. For part of the way the trees beside the roadway met overhead, forming an arch, now more of gold than green, through which the golden sunshine filtered and flickered in delicious coolness. Once or twice the narrow road widened into a grassy space; “Turning-out places,” Ben explained, for teams to pass each other. Which set Posey to wondering what people would do if they met in any other than the right spot. “But they _have_ to meet there,” Ben asserted. “When one person sees another coming he stops and waits. There’s no trouble when everybody looks out.” But what was to Posey the crowning charm was a wide drainage ditch or canal, near the outer edge of the swamp, the cause of the fringe of dead bushes she had already noticed. Ben stopped his horse on the bridge that crossed it, that at their leisure they might look up the long, straight stretch of water, whose clean-cut banks of velvety turf narrowed in perspective till they seemed at last to meet in the level distance, while on its still surface, trees, shrubs, clumps of nodding blue asters, and the sky, bluer than all, were reflected as in a mirror. “Oh, how lovely!” cried Posey. “I never saw so pretty a place in all my life. I wish we could ride through it all day.” “Yes, it is pretty,” answered practical Ben, “but it’s not good for much as it is now. I suppose, though, it will all be dry land some day; that’s what the man said where I stayed all night, and this big ditch is to help. He thought some time it would all be dry land.” “At any rate, I’m glad to have seen it as it is now,” declared Posey.