Excerpt from Speak to the Winds; The Far Traveller; Spring on an Arctic Island; Frogman; Men to Match My MountainsPerhaps on some such summer day, an early visitor to the coast, seeing the swirl of lazy green about the ledges, the rockweed lifting and falling like a field of grass, named the place The Pasture; though no one could say what pastured there, outside of crabs and cunners and south-flying sea birds. In winter, The Pasture was white water for weeks at a time. Big rollers lifted up green from across the gulf and smashed in on the head land, shattering the granite sometimes, Shifting great boulders and chang ing the face of the shore. Sheets of spray roared up, twenty, forty, fifty feet high, drove in to freeze in white rime on the spruces, which on the eastern Shore were stunted like trees at timber line.The island was all granite, its peak a round hill a hundred feet high and naked as a cup. What grew there, grew where the land leveled out at the base of the hill, a wild tangle of northern coastal forest, on roots driven into the crevices of rock. Through centuries, it had made topsoil, deep enough on the island's western end to grow a little grass, and on that side, too, a half-mile back from the shore, just before the hill started to climb, was a small, deep pond in an alder swamp of almost tropical lushness.This pond was always full; it caught the wash of rain from the hill behind it, and, besides, it was spring-fed. From the high, dry, lichened ledges, no one would suspect that the island was a watery place, but deep Within it flowed never-failing streams, surfacing here at the pond and trickling down, through crevices into the sea - in summer, a Slow, steady drip dampening the rocks above tide line, in winter, great waterfalls of yellow ice.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.