Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this file which includes the original illustrations. See 50650-h.htm or 50650-h.zip: (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/50650/50650-h/50650-h.htm) or (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/50650/50650-h.zip) Images of the original pages are available through Internet Archive/American Libraries. See https://archive.org/details/layoflandsharpda00sharrich THE LAY OF THE LAND by DALLAS LORE SHARP Author of “Wild Life Near Home” and “Roof and Meadow” With Drawings by Elizabeth Myers Snagg [Illustration: LOGO] Boston and New York Houghton Mifflin Company The Riverside Press Cambridge 1908 Copyright 1908 by Dallas Lore Sharp All Rights Reserved Published September 1908 To the Memory of my Friend William Frank Morrison, M. D. Contents I. The Muskrats are Building 1 II. Christmas in the Woods 19 III. A Cure for Winter 35 IV. The Nature-Student 56 V. Chickadee 74 VI. The Missing Tooth 89 VII. The Sign of the Shad-bush 105 VIII. The Nature Movement 114 IX. June 127 X. A Broken Feather 137 XI. High Noon 148 XII. The Palace in the Pig-pen 161 XIII. An Account with Nature 175 XIV. The Buzzard of the Bear Swamp 189 XV. The Lay of the Land 200 [Illustration] I The Muskrats are Building WE have had a series of long, heavy rains, and water is standing over the swampy meadow. It is a dreary stretch, this wet, sedgy land in the cold twilight, drearier than any part of the woods or the upland pastures. They are empty, but the meadow is flat and wet, naked and all unsheltered. And a November night is falling. The darkness deepens. A raw wind is rising. At nine o’clock the moon swings round and full to the crest of the ridge, and pours softly over. I button the heavy ulster close, and in my rubber boots go down to the river and follow it out to the middle of the meadow, where it meets the main ditch at the sharp turn toward the swamp. Here at the bend, behind a clump of black alders, I sit quietly down and wait. I am not mad, nor melancholy; I am not after copy. Nothing is the matter with me. I have come out to the bend to watch the muskrats building, for that small mound up the ditch is not an old haycock, but a half-finished muskrat house.