[Illustration:  “Pausing in each deep pool to cool and refresh itself” (p. 109)]

Sometimes the creek almost sinks from sight in a bed of hot sand; it leaves only a narrow runlet of water idling along the foot of the high bank and pausing in each deep pool at the feet of the overhanging trees to cool and refresh itself for its onward journey.  To these quiet pools goes the fisherman with his minnow seine and a stick.  He knows that in the water among the roots of the old tree lie shiners and soap minnows, creek chubs and soft-shelled “crawdads,” the kind that make good bait for the black bass down in the river.  He pokes around vigorously with his stick and sends them scurrying into his short seine.  Hither also go the school-boy fishermen, with a willow pole and one gallus apiece, seeking to entice the patriarchal chub, the shiner and the stone-roller.  From this point down, the young anglers are strung along the banks.  Some try their luck for sunfish by the piles of loose rock and boulders, and some would tempt the bullheads from siestas in the mud.

Above the mill-dam the water backs up to form a peaceful pond which mirrors the trees and the rushes and cat-tails above it and sleeps beneath the thicket of willows where the redwings flock in the evenings.  Broad leaves of the arrow-head and pickerel-weed give shelter to the coot, bobbing her head and neck as she makes nervous journeys through the water, sometimes scratching a long streak across its mirror-like surface as she uses both feet and wings in her haste to escape from the lone pedestrian.  At sundown the sandhill crane may sometimes be surprised, standing like a silhouette by the shore of a grassy island.  The awkward, wary bittern and the still more vigilant least bittern are familiar residents here.

Below the dam the creek winds at will through a peaceful valley, appropriating to itself an ever widening stretch from the farm lands.  Sometimes it hastens down a pebbly speedway, then slackens its pace and wanders off from its course until suddenly it seems to grow alarmed, whips around a bend and comes hurrying back.  Sometimes its level flood-plain is a quarter mile wide, bounded on either side by steep timbered hills which stretch on and on down the valley until the sky receives them in a glory of blue haze.  Sometimes the creek has cut its way straight down the face of a high rock cliff on one side, while on the other side is a level meadow with bushy-margined ponds.  In places the water of the creek lies asleep in a dream of sunshine, but further on it ripples and gurgles over a bouldered bed, walled in by rocky slopes.  These are kept moist by water trickling down from hidden springs among the roots of the shrubs and vines, ferns and mosses which soften the grim limestone into beauty of form and color.

[Illustration:  “Lies asleep in A dream of sunshine” (p. 111)]