Some Summer Days in Iowa | Page 4

up
by the languid breeze. Amber oat-fields are ripening in the sun and in
the corn-fields there is a sense of the gathering force of life as the
sturdy plants lift themselves higher and higher during
"The long blue solemn hours, serenely flowing Whence earth, we feel,
gets steady help and good."

Many a tourist comes home to a land like this, weary and penniless,
like Sir Launfal after his fruitless quest, to discover that the grail of
health and rest and beauty which he sought afar so strenuously is most
easily and readily found at home.
* * * * *
[Illustration: "CURVES WHICH ADD MUCH TO ITS WILD
BEAUTY" (p. 23)]
Ceaselessly up and down the old road passes the pageant of the year,
never two days the same, especially at this season. In the middle of the
road is a dirt wagon-track, on either side of which is a broad belt of
grass, flowers, shrubs and small trees till you come to the fence.
Beyond one fence the thick woods has a heavy undergrowth; over the
other is a well-wooded pasture. On the south side, between the road and
the fence there is a little brook, sometimes with a high, mossy and
timbered bank, sometimes completely hidden by tall grasses. The road
rises and falls in gentle grades, with alternating banks and swales. At
one high point there is a view down the long avenue of trees across the
open valley beyond, where the city lies snugly, and then upward to the
timber on the far heights across the river where the hills are always
softly blue, no matter what the season of the year. Sometimes the old
road sweeps around fine old trees in unmathematical curves which add
much to its wild beauty. The first man who drove along it, a hundred
years or more ago, followed a cow-path and the road hasn't changed
much since, though the fences which were later threaded through the
shrubs and trees on either side, run straighter. Never was summer day
long enough for me to see and to study all that the old road had to show.
Here, at the moist edge of the road, the ditch stone-crop is opening its
yellow-green flowers, each one a study in perfect symmetry. With the
showy, straw-colored cyperus it flourishes under the friendly shade of
the overhanging cord-grasses whose flowering stalks already have shot
up beyond the reach of a man. Among them grows the tall blue vervain,
its tapering fingers adorned with circles of blue flowers, like sapphire
rings passing from the base to the tips of the fingers. You must part
these grasses and pass through them to see the thicket of golden-rod

making ready for the yellow festival later on. White cymes of spicy
basil are mingled with the purple loosestrife and back of these the
fleabanes lift daisy-like heads among the hazel overhanging the wire
fence. Then the elms and the oaks and in the openings the snowy, starry
campion whose fringed petals are beginning to close, marking the
morning's advance. In the moist places the Canada lily glows like a
flaming torch, its pendant bells slowly swinging in the breeze, ringing
in the annual climax and jubilee of the flowering season.
Across the road the monkey flower grins affably at the edge of the
grass and the water hemlock, with a hollow stem as big as a gun-barrel
and tall as a man, spreads its large umbels of tiny white flowers on
curving branches like a vase-shaped elm in miniature. Twice or thrice
pinnate leaves, toothed like a tenon saw, with conspicuous veins ending
in the notches, brand it as the beaver poison, otherwise known as the
musquash root and spotted cowbane. From its tuberous roots was
prepared the poison which Socrates drank without fear; why should he
fear death? Does he not still live among us? Does he not question us,
teach us? Yellow loose-strifes and rattle-box are in the swamp, and a
patch of swamp milkweed with brilliant fritillaries sipping nectar from
its purple blossoms. White wands of meadow-sweet, clusters of
sensitive fern, a big shrub of pussy willow with cool green leaves as
grateful now as the white and gold blossoms were in April; white
trunks and fluttering leaves of small aspens where the grosbeak has just
finished nesting; bushy willows and withes of young poplar; nodding
wool-grasses and various headed sedges; all these are between the
roadside and the fence. There the elder puts out blossoms of spicy snow
big as dinner-plates and the Maryland yellow-throat who has four
babies in the bulky nest at the foot of the black-berry bush sits and
sings his "witchity, witchity, witchity." The lark sparrow has her nest at
the foot of a thistle and her mate has perched