Crows (Sarah Orne Jewett)

From A Marsh Island:

It was a famous day for crows: from one field after another a flight of them took heavily to their wings, and, as if unwillingly, mounted to the higher air. They cawed loudly, and appeared to have business of a public nature on hand. Some were migrating, and others were contemptuously rebuking these wanderers, and making their arrangements to winter in their familiar woods: it was all a great chatter and clatter and commotion. The affairs of human beings were but trivial in comparison. Helpless creatures, who crept to and fro on the face of the earth, and were drawn about by captive animals of lesser intellect, were not worth noticing, and the great black birds sailed magnificently down the sky, with the fresh breeze cool in their beaks and the sunlight shining on their sombre wings. Whatever might be said of their morals, they were masters of the air, and could fly, while men could not.

I liked the cover art on this University of Pennsylvania edition of Jewett's novel, but I didn't immediately get it, in part because some elements on my copy are obscured by librarian's tape. It's a cropped version of a painting by Martin Johnson Heade (1819-1904) entitled Gremlin in the Studio I, and the round object in the left, just below the painting-in-a-painting, is in fact a gremlin. Harder still to notice is that water is flowing out of the marsh depicted in the upper canvas and onto the studio floor.

Update: Is it in fact "a gremlin"? I haven't been able to find out whether Heade actually used that word in referring to this painting; most sources indicate that it wasn't coined until after he died.