THE FAERY YEAR 



of things not urgent ! Yellow oat grass, pompous 

 timothy, with its stiff, wheat-green cylinder, fescue, 

 brome, and annual meadow grasses, crested dog's-tail 

 and rough cock's-foot these and others make the 

 dense, swaying forest that has just gone down. Not 

 a grass, even the rough cock's-foot, but has beautiful 

 characteristics and significant devices for getting its 

 meed of sun and air. In one kind we note the 

 graceful droop, in another the hair-like stems and 

 spikelets, in a third the obscure blossoms like the 

 fluff on the head of an unfledged nestling. Some 

 were toothed like a saw, others carried their foliage 

 like the spruce fir. They softly brushed each other's 

 flossy heads, and divided up the lavish pollen when- 

 ever the lightest zephyr breathed on the field. 



Witchery of July 



Though many birds still sing, skylarks in snatches 

 sometimes on the ground in the midst of a duel 

 swallows long and amiably in the early morning, 

 goldfinches and many linnets busy with their late 

 broods, July's music has little of the power and 

 rapture of May. True, the thrush, when he sings 

 in earnest, shows himself complete master of his art 

 by July, but that wonderful freshness about his 

 evening song has gone. The feature of the month 

 is rather silence than song. In woods, at the close 

 of a burning day, when the last peepy notes of the 

 thrush have died out, the nightjars, whose hour it 

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