TANGLE-LEAF PAPERS. 69 
across a brook on an iron bridge and into a 
grove of buckeye trees heavy with young leaves 
and clustered blooms, about which the wild 
~ bees were booming merrily enough. 
Here I stopped, and sitting in the saddle, 
sketched in the rough outlines of a boy who 
was trying to snare sucker-fish, in a clear eddy 
of the brook, with a looped wire. The first 
Baltimore oriole of the season was singing 
overhead in its peculiar, monotonous way. 
This bird’s song always seems spiral to me, as 
if it had got a twist in coming forth. On the 
anchor-posts of an old water-gate, I saw some 
of the finest lichens I have ever met with; 
great round rosettes, puffed and ruffled, show- 
ing many delicate shades of sap-green, celadon 
and gray. Not far from here I found a hill 
too steep for comfortable riding, and after 
pushing my machine up it, I was glad to see 
before me a long stretch of level road through 
beautiful farms. An. apple orchard, too 
closely set, was beginning to bloom, and a long 
row of cherry-trees was white as a windrow of 
snow. What is more expressive of comforta- 
ble, worthy wealth and liberal security from the 
failures of life than a broad, well-kept Western 
farm? Here were fields of wheat, so wide that 
they looked almost like prairies, side by side 
with meadow-lands on which the clover and 
timothy were thick and green over hundreds 
of acres; and then the rich black plough-land, 
too, where soon the corn-planting would begin. 
Orchards, garden-plats, grazing lands, cattle, 
swine, sheep, and horses, broad-winged barns, 
windmills for pumping water, and a spacious 
residence embowered in maple trees ; surely it 
is well to be an Indiana farmer. 
