A LAZY, IDLE BROOK
"Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business is only to be
sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things. And it is not
by any means certain that a man's business is the most important
thing he has to do."--ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON: An Apology for Idlers.
I
A CASUAL INTRODUCTION
On the South Shore of Long Island, all things incline to a natural
somnolence. There are no ambitious mountains, no braggart cliffs,
no hasty torrents, no hustling waterfalls in that land,
"In which it seemeth always afternoon."
The salt meadows sleep in the summer sun; the farms and market-
gardens yield a placid harvest to a race of singularly unhurried
tillers of the soil; the low hills rise with gentle slopes, not
caring to get too high in the world, only far enough to catch a
pleasant glimpse of the sea and a breath of fresh air; the very
trees grow leisurely, as if they felt that they had "all the time
there is." And from this dreamy land, close as it lies to the
unresting ocean, the tumult of the breakers and the foam of ever-
turning tides are shut off by the languid lagoons of the Great South
Bay and a long range of dunes, crested with wire-grass, bay-bushes,
and wild-roses.
In such a country you could not expect a little brook to be noisy,
fussy, energetic. If it were not lazy, it would be out of keeping.
But the actual and undisguised idleness of this particular brook was
another affair, and one in which it was distinguished among its
fellows. For almost all the other little rivers of the South Shore,
lazy as they may be by nature, yet manage to do some kind of work
before they finish the journey from their crystal-clear springs into
the brackish waters of the bay. They turn the wheels of sleepy
gristmills, while the miller sits with his hands in his pockets
underneath the willow-trees. They fill reservoirs out of which
great steam-engines pump the water to quench the thirst of Brooklyn.
Even the smaller streams tarry long enough in their seaward
sauntering to irrigate a few cranberry-bogs and so provide that
savoury sauce which makes the Long Island turkey a fitter subject
for Thanksgiving.
But this brook of which I speak did none of these useful things.
It was absolutely out of business.
There was not a mill, nor a reservoir, nor a cranberry-bog, on all
its course of a short mile. The only profitable affair it ever
undertook was to fill a small ice-pond near its entrance into the
Great South Bay. You could hardly call this a very energetic
enterprise. It amounted to little more than a good-natured consent
to allow itself to be used by the winter for the making of ice, if
the winter happened to be cold enough. Even this passive industry
came to nothing; for the water, being separated from the bay only by
a short tideway under a wooden bridge on the south country road, was
too brackish to freeze easily; and the ice, being pervaded with
weeds, was not much relished by the public. So the wooden ice-
house, innocent of paint, and toned by the weather to a soft, sad-
coloured gray, stood like an improvised ruin among the pine-trees
beside the pond.
It was through this unharvested ice-pond, this fallow field of
water, that my lady Graygown and I entered on acquaintance with our
lazy, idle brook. We had a house, that summer, a few miles down the
bay. But it was a very small house, and the room that we like best
was out of doors. So we spent much time in a sailboat,--by name
"The Patience,"--making voyages of exploration into watery corners
and byways. Sailing past the wooden bridge one day, when a strong
east wind had made a very low tide, we observed the water flowing
out beneath the road with an eddying current. We were interested to
discover where such a stream came from. But the sailboat could not
go under the bridge, nor even make a landing on the shore without
risk of getting aground. The next day we came back in a rowboat to
follow the clue of curiosity. The tide was high now, and we passed
with the reversed current under the bridge, almost bumping our heads
against the timbers. Emerging upon the pond, we rowed across its
shallow, weed-encumbered waters, and were introduced without
ceremony to one of the most agreeable brooks that we had ever met.
It was quite broad where it came into the pond,--a hundred feet from
side to side,--bordered with flags and rushes and feathery meadow
grasses. The real channel meandered in sweeping curves from bank to
bank, and the water, except in the swifter current, was filled with
an amazing quantity of some aquatic moss. The woods came straggling
down on either shore. There were fallen trees in the stream here
and there. On one of the points an old swamp-maple, with its
decrepit branches and its leaves already touched with the hectic
colours of decay, hung far out over the water which was undermining
it, looking and leaning downward, like an aged man who bends, half-
sadly and half-willingly, towards the grave.