54 AUTUMN NOTES IN IOWA 



sunlight. Soldiers in blue and others in brown 

 khaki moved singly or in small groups across the 

 parade. A young guard rested in the shade of 

 one of the small elms while the two privates he was 

 commanding passed into the scorching heat with 

 lawn-mower and sickle. Mule teams were mowing 

 the lawns between the officers ' row and the trolley 

 station, while another team was drawing a mowing 

 machine farther out to a wide meadow. Summer- 

 like, too, was the sharp crescendo of the cicada, 

 mingling with the piercing cries of a flicker. 



Beyond the stable yards, with their hundreds 

 and hundreds of cavalry horses, near the western 

 border of the Reservation, is a considerable area 

 of swampy ground, today almost a tropical jungle 

 of tall weeds. The brown-headed cattails are fully 

 ten feet high, and so are the stout sunflowers, mth 

 two goldfinches busy about the giant heads. Here 

 are bindweed, white-involucred spurge, blue ver- 

 vain, tangled masses of yellow wood-sorrel, a 

 clump of the '^ smallest of asters" — a familiar 

 weed with none of the beauty one associates with 

 the genus. The bumblebees are on the thistle 

 heads, and big black-and-gold spiders lurk near the 

 centers of their large wheel webs, geometric, tra- 

 versed by a thousand delicate spokes. A golden 

 array of striking long-bracted tickseed-sunflowers 

 is characteristic of the locality and the season. 



Standing before the long riding-hall and look- 



