INDIAN SUMMER IN KANSAS. 61 



full of those exhilarating qualities which our lungs 

 afterward drank in so freely on the plains. Indian 

 summer, delightful anywhere, is especially so in 

 Kansas. 



From the advance guard of the winter king not a 

 single chilling zephyr steals forward among the tar- 

 rying ones of summer. Soothing and gentle as when 

 laden with spicy fragrance south, they here shower 

 the whole land with sunbeams. Earth no longer 

 seems a heavy, inert mass, but floats in that smoky, 

 fleecy atmosphere with which artists delight so much 

 to wrap their angels. It is as if the warmer, lighter 

 clouds of sunny weather were nestling close to earth, 

 frightened from the skies, like a flock of white swans, 

 at the October howls of winter. But I never could 

 agree with those writers who call this season dreamy. 

 If such it be, it is surely a dream of motion. All na- 

 ture appears quickened. The inhabitants of the air 

 have commenced their southern pilgrimage, and the 

 oldest and leading ganders may be heard croaking, 

 day-time and night-time, to their wedge-shaped flocks 

 their narrative of summer experiences at the Arctic 

 circle, and their commands for the present journey. 



Sachem, I find, has recorded as a discovery in nat- 

 ural history that geese form their flocks in wedge 

 shape that they may easier "make a split" for the 

 south when Nature, with her north pole, stirs up 

 their feeding and breeding-grounds in November 

 gales, and changes their fields of operation into fields 

 of ice. Sachem was sadly addicted to slang phrases. 



All game, I may remark, is wilder at this season 

 of the year than earlier. If the earth is dreaming, 



