On either side of her boat now the water was so shallow that sedge and rushes rose above it.
The herons flapped across her path to their morning fishing.
The creek still made a narrow channel for the canoe.

Pretty soon its current flowed between wild undulating tracts of bright green moss in which the trees still stood dead, but bark and lichen now adhered to their trunks, and a few more strokes brought her to the fringes of young spruce and balsam that grew upon the drier knolls.

She smelt living trees, dry woods and pastures in front.

Then a turn of the narrow creek, and she saw a log-house standing not twenty paces from the stream.

Above and around it maples and elms held out green branches, and there was some sort of a clearing farther on.
Ann felt exultant in her triumph.