The Lay of the Land Author:Dallas Lore Sharp This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1908 edition. Excerpt: ... XV ?$t &ay of fyt She loved nature--from a veranda, a dog-cart, the deck of a vessel. She had been to the seashore for a... more » whole June, the next June to the mountains, then a June to an inland farm. "And I enjoyed it!" she exclaimed; "the sky-blue, I mean, the sea-blue, and the green of the hills. But as for seeing fiddler crabs and chewinks and woodchucks -- things! why, I simply did n't. In fact, I believe that most of your fiddling crabs and moralizing stumps and philosophizing woodchucks are simply the creatures of a disordered imagination." I quite agreed as to the fiddling (some of it) and Zfy of tfy &mb the philosophizing; I disagreed, however, as to the reality of the crabs and the woodchucks; for it was not the attributes and powers of these creatures that she really disbelieved in, but the very existence of the creatures themselves, -- along her seashore, and upon the farm that she visited. "As for fiddler crabs and chewinks and woodchucks -- things" she did not see them. Certainly not. Yet a fiddler crab is as real an entity as a thousand-acre marsh, -- and in its way as interesting. It is a sorry soul that looks for nothing out of doors but fiddler crabs, and insists upon their fiddling; that never sees the sky-blue, the sea-blue, and the green of the rolling hills. I shall never forget a moonrise over the Maurice River marshes that I witnessed one night in early June. It was a peculiarly solemn sight, and one of the profoundly beautiful experiences of my life, there in the wide, weird silence of the half sea-land, with the tide at flood. Nor shall I ever forget two or three of the stops which I made in the marshes that day to watch the fiddler crabs. Nor shall I forget how they fiddled. For fiddle they did, just as they...« less