The Song of the Cardinal #245604

Last season the Cardinal had pipped his shell, away to the north, in that paradise of the birds, the Limberlost. There thousands of acres of black marsh-muck stretch under summers' sun and winters' snows There are darksome pools of murky water, bits of swale and high morass. Giants of the forest reach skyward, or, coated with velvet slime, lie decaying in sun flecked pools, while the underbrush is almost impenetrable.