D USKY and strong, You lift high your branches, Mighty magnolia; Starred in rayed clusters, Green, glossy, shining, With thousands of leaves; Sixty feet high From the base to the top, Green cone of glory: Waking in spring With the beautiful cream-white cups of your blossom, By the mocking-bird's mad bursts of song. Gulfwards they know you, Where the chocolate-brown rivers boiling and fretting Sway silently southward Past the flat cotton-fields. DeSoto stood under your branches, Whetting his sword; Marquette tied his boat where you stood overshading some bayou, Knelt there and prayed; LaSalle planted beside you the golden lilies of France, Proud and alone; You are the dream of a forgotten Empire, Louisiana and a lithe fiery quadroon singing, Leather-legged hunters stuck your leaves in their coonskin caps, Calico-clad settlers tied your blooms to the bonnets of their wagons. Dusky and strong, You lift high your branches, Mighty magnolia; Forgetting, not knowing How war raged once under your shade. Iron guns of Vicksburg Once boomed through your branches, Green leaves to the ground: You were the hope of the south, Here bugles blared, here flags were flung, here regiments raised a ragged cheer, Here too the site of many a shallow grave At which some blue-eyed farmer's boy clutched at the bloody grass. You guarded too the stately house Smooth-ruffled silks within were spread beneath the lustres, Low bosoms gleamed, the fiddlers scraped like mad; Mad kisses and low murmurs thrilled your branches: Dusky and strong, Dusky, deep-green, Jade green and faint gold, You stand now apart. Apart from this age and its impotent clamor, Its ravening fury, its pillage of ultimate destruction; Of an empire lost and forgotten, Blown like the faint perfume from your chalices of snow, Spreading about your dark trunk and your deep heavy shade to draw me In the stifling slow midsummer days to the red-brown Southland still. JOHN GOULD FLETCHER CODFISH CHOWDER AND SUN T BY ROBERT P. TRISTRAM COFFIN HERE are many kinds of picnics; but my kind is the only kind that satisfies so well that it lasts me through a whole year. To begin with you must have the Maine coast. But more than that—a particular part of the Maine coast, Casco Bay with its islands, a new one for every day in the year, ranging in size from Great Chebeague and Great Island, each capable of supporting far-flung villages, to the Chunk o' Pork and the Pound o' Tea and Jello with its bushel of soil. And you must have my kind of a family—one in which there are enough babies sprinkled in among the grown-ups to keep a panoramic camera busy. A picnic without a dozen yards of grandchildren would be only half a picnic for my mother. Not any children at all will do, either; they must be babies who take life as a sunrise or a circus or both together even when they still go on all fours. Then you must have islands with fir trees packed so closely together that you might walk along their tops, if you were spry, and you must have the myrrh of the balsams in your nose along with the smell of the sea all a summer's day. It must be a day in August and one of the kind that you will find nowhere else on this round earth save Maine; northwest wind blowing the sky as clean and clear as a bell, a blue sky that you can fairly hear ring, and white galleons of clouds with flat keels which sail over by thousands and yet never get in the way of the sun. The sunshine turns everything to amber and crystal and pours over the world like a tide. You can hear it lapping the granite coasts. The whole world is very hot yet airy; you can smell the tar in the calking of the boats. Your face turns into a russet banner. Your brain turns into sunlight. The ocean grows darker and deeper blue between the white crests that are coming in from far Spain. The sea and the sun get in under your soul. I cannot begin to tell you all the ingredients you mix together to make this day of bliss. Somewhere at the beginning you stir in a motor boat of the sort that is wide in the beam, good to hold a small army. You add spray all over everybody, especially the children; for my picnic would lack spice if all of us were not well drenched down with brine and salted down till our eyes were a fast blue. To have the best spray you need a flooding tide to kick up a chop against the wind. Throw into the picnic all the sandwiches, ginger ale, coffee, salads, fruit, cakes, and doughnuts you please, for nothing can spoil the mess. You have the safe sine qua non in the baskets at the bottom of the boat. Nothing could kill the flavor of the clams and lobsters you are carrying with you alive. The codfish are alive and waiting, too, out in the ocean you are heading into. It is well to add an aunt who makes it a point to be prepared. She will have the salt and the pepper all done up in separate packages and marked against mistake; and she will have castor oil and all sorts of unguents and ointments for the aches and the burns the children are bound to collect. A dash of uncles who are landlubbers and who are finding their annual sea a moving and epic affair is always in order. And don't forget the lady who will bring all sorts of cups and spoons and knives and forks that no one will possibly have time to use when you are all into the feast up to the eyes. A demijohn of cold spring water you surely must have. If it is the oldfashioned kind of crock with blue flowers painted on it by hand, so much the better. Add a pinch or two of song. For one should approach this picnic singing, or trying to sing. After the many islands, all white with granite and dark green with spruces and cedars, all looking as bright and new as they looked on the morning of Creation, you must have the island where you are to land. I am the last person to be finicky, but this island should be absolutely like Pond Island. Now Pond Island has always been in the family along with my mother's ladder-back chairs and melodeon. When they were young and quite brand-new to each other, mother and father lived one summer upon this jewel they had acquired soon after marriage. It was before most of us were born or "thought of," as Maine folks delicately put the matter of generation. It was lucky for most of us, for, though the island is the very heart of a picnic, it is not for the everyday use of unhardy souls. The house they built had to be anchored down with chains; and the chains had to be moved each time the wind shifted. For Pond Island is the last place between Maine and Spain. There isn't a tree on it; the twelve winds from the twelve corners of the sky use it for their playground. The spray of a sou'easter salts the springs that bubble up in its very center. The sheep that bite its grass have to be thickset and low to the earth; they carry their heads raked like the stacks and masts of ocean craft. They are adopted cousins of the gales and the surf. The island can be smelt miles to the lee, since it is one mass of bayberry and juniper. Pond Island has its name from the many ponds which pit its slopes. Years ago a lobsterman found a crock full of Spanish doubloons in a cleft of its rocks. That was enough to bring searchers for the treasure of Captain Kidd hither to dig in droves. All Maine fishermen believe in buried treasure. Why shouldn't they, when any lobster pot may bring fortune flapping and kicking to the |