[This is the first in a series of occasional pieces called Landscapes. Their purpose is not to give a journalistic picture of a place, but to draw, by imaginative means, portraits of some of the distinct regions of America that still remain.]
In the temperate latitudes of Captain Claude Morgan’s culture—the parallel of Athens and of Maryland’s Eastern Shore—it is winter. The solstice, in truth, is not yet upon us, but so unequal is the Sun’s daily skirmish with the dark that though he blinds our eyes as usual (so that, looking away, we see his lingering image where he is not), he warms no more than our skins and the clapboards of our houses: the chill of the night behind us and of the longer night to come never leaves our bones and( hearts and inner rooms, where not long since it came only now and then in dreams. So late does he take the field that the skipjacks and bugeyes dredge oysters from the Chesapeake by starlight every morning; and so early leave it that bright Orion will have risen from the ocean, will have thrown an arm and leg over the marshy flats of Maryland, before ever the women get supper. In what other season might the old man sit thus in a ladderback chair by the window of his bedroom, and watch Andromeda on an empty stomach?
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