IN THE MORNING OF TIME

IN THE
MORNING OF TIME

BY

CHARLES G. D. ROBERTS

Author of “The Kindred of the Wild,” etc.

NEW YORK
FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY
PUBLISHERS

Copyright, 1922, by
Frederick A. Stokes Company

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

CONTENTS

IN THE MORNING OF TIME

In The Morning of Time

It lay apparently afloat on the sluggish, faintly discolored tide––a placid, horse-faced, shovel-nosed head, with bumpy holes for ears and immense round eyes of a somewhat anxious mildness.

The anxiety in the great eyes was not without reason, for their owner had just arrived in the tepid and teeming waters of this estuary, and the creatures which he had already seen about him were both unknown and menacing. But the inshore shallows were full of water-weeds of a rankness and succulence far beyond anything he had enjoyed in his old habitat, and he was determined to secure himself a place here.

From time to time, as some new monster came in sight, the ungainly head would shoot up amazingly to a distance of five or ten, or even fifteen feet, on a swaying pillar of a neck, in order to get a better view of the stranger. Then it would slowly sink back again to its repose on the water.

The water at this point was almost fresh, because the estuary, though fully two miles wide, was filled 2 with the tide of the great river rolling slowly down from the heart of the continent. The further shore was so flat that nothing could be seen of it but an endless, pale green forest of giant reeds. But the nearer shore was skirted, at a distance of perhaps half a mile from the water, by a rampart of abrupt, bright, rust-red cliffs. The