130 With Feet to the Earth 



fields and something would surely be lack- 

 ing in our early summer landscape. 



Autumn is the time when the ragweed 

 becomes actually coarse, and then because 

 it has not learned to grow old gracefully. 

 It ages like a vagrant and grows seedy and 

 out at elbows, instead of venerable. There 

 are grace and pathos in trees and vines that 

 glow with October color, then, having spent 

 their last energy on beauty, drop their 

 leaves and sink to sleep ; but plants win 

 contumely that merely dry and break and 

 wither, that splash the fields with rust, even 

 when their summer aspect and demeanor 

 have been exemplary. Nobody has sung 

 of the ragweed, nobody has described it, 

 except botanically, nobody has painted it, 

 pressed it, put it into a hot-house, tried to 

 reform it, or sat in the shade of it and tried 

 to think large things about it. All-seeing 

 Thoreau does not mention it, and the phy- 

 sicians have not put it into the materia 

 medica. As the old woman in the country 

 does not dry or stew it with other "yarbs," 

 I surmise that she once boiled a quantity 

 into a tea and made some suffering patient 



