Part 1

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THE LAY OF THE LAND

DALLAS LORE SHARP

Author of “Wild Life Near Home” and “Roof and Meadow”

With Drawings by Elizabeth Myers Snagg

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

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.