And so the Argonauts sail westward again in the pitch blackness of the gathering storm. They know the harbor floor as they know the floors of their homes and can as well feel their way. What if the falling tide leaves the flats bare and they may not win to the mooring, but must lie at anchor off the channel edge until morning shows gray through the rain? They have won the golden fleece of adventure from the blue sea to eastward and sailed home with it. CHAPTER XIV VOICES OF THE BROOKSIDE For two hundred years the water has rippled over the sill on which once firmly set the gate to the old milldam. Of the mill, save this, no sliver of wood remains, and even the tradition of the miller and his work is gone. We merely know that here stood one of the grist mills of the early pioneers, a mill to which the neighbors brought their corn in sacks, perchance upon their shoulders, and after the wheel had turned and the grist was ground, carried the meal off in the same way. Thus rapidly does the smoothing hand of time wipe out man and his works. But still the water ripples over the old, brown oak sill, and he who listens may hear the brook telling a story all day long in purling undertones. I fancy its language a simple one, too, but its words of one syllable tumble so swiftly over one another that, in spite of their liquid purity of tone, I never quite catch them. It is the brook's rapidity of utterance that troubles me. I am quite sure, always, that if I really got the syllables and wrote them down I should, with study, be able to translate it all. It ought not to be half so difficult as these hieroglyphic and cuneiform inscriptions on stone and brick buried in Assyrian ruins for ten thousand years, more or less, and now blithely put into modern speech by the Egyptologists. The brook writes for me, too. On every placid pool at the foot of some race of ripples it mixes Morse-code dots and dashes with stenographic curves, all written in white foam on the smooth black mirror of the surface. Nor does it end there, so eager it is to call its message to my notice. Through the quiver of sun and shade it sends heliograph flashes to me on the bank, making again the dots and dashes of the Morse-code alphabet, yet still with such lightning-like rapidity that my dull eye fails to read. Only the foam writing gives brief opportunity for one to study the characters and decide what they mean: Sometimes there it is not difficult to find words in the Morse-code and phrases in the stenographic curves though I have no more than a word or a brief phrase before the current rearranges the puzzle and I must begin all over again. I doubt not many brookside idlers have done as much as that. I fancy many a summer couple, say a brave telegraph clerk and a fair stenographer, have worked out as much as "I love you" and "God bless our home" long before this.