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. 



