HARBINGERS OF SUMMER 



golden delight, their stem leaves will lose 

 all this riot of outline and coloration and 

 settle down to plain, smooth-edged green. 

 The blossoms may need a foil, but will 

 brook no rival on their own stem. 



The path that I take to my southerly 

 looking masthead soon leaves the gerar- 

 dias behind. They need alluvium and a 

 certain fertility and moisture, and the crev- 

 ices of the rock are not for them. There 

 as I climb among the cedars I pass the 

 withered stalks of the saxifrage that a 

 month ago made the crevices white. 

 Now only an occasional belated blossom, 

 scraggly and worn as if with dissipation, 

 seems hastening to reach oblivion with its 

 fellows. 



But the wild columbine still holds horns 

 of honey plenty for the sipping of moth 

 and butterfly, whose proboscides are long 



enough to reach the ultimate tip where it 

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