The

The Welcome back, everyone to one thousand one classic short stories and tales.

Today's story is from Brett Hart, one of the most influential writers of the Gold Rush era in the United States.

And now High Watermark by Brett Hart.

When the tide was out in the dead low marsh, its extended dreariness was patent.

Its spongy, low-line surface, sluggish, inky pools and tortuous sloughs, twisting their slimy way,

eel-like toward the open bay, were all hard facts. So were the few green tussocks,

with their scant blades, their amphibious flavor, and unpleasant dampness.

If you chose to indulge your fancy, although the flat monotony of the dead low marsh was not inspiring,

the wavy line of scattered drift gave an unpleasant consciousness of the spent waters,

and made the dead certainty of the returning tide a gloomy reflection, which no present sunshan

could dissipate. The greener meadowlands seemed oppressed with this idea, and made no positive attempt at vegetation until the work of reclamation should be complete.

In the bitter fruit of the low cranberry bushes, one might fancy he detected a naturally sweet disposition, curdled and soured, by an injudicious course of too much regular cold water.

But if Dead Low Marsh was cheerless at the slack of the low tide, you should have seen it

when the tide was strong and full. When the damp air blew chilly over the cold glittering

expanse and came to the faces of those who looked seaward like another tide, when a steel-like

glint marked the low

hollows in the sinuous line of slough, when the great shell-encrusted trunks of fallen trees

arose again, and went forth on their dreary purposeless wanderings, when the glossy ducks swung

silently, making neither ripple nor furrow on the shimmering surface. When the fog came in with the tide

and shut out the blue above, even as the green below had been obliterated, when boatmen, lost in

that fog, paddling about in a hopeless way, started at what seemed the brushing of merman's fingers

...