Meadow and Mountain 



botanist calls them " false Indigo," but I dislike the name 

 false applied to a flower. The Indigo flower itself is as blue 

 as the bluebird. They are never numerous in any one place. 

 They grow from one to three feet high, and their branches 

 are as shapely as those of a sycamore tree, and as smooth 

 as that tree's trunk when the outer bark is shed. Seed-pods 

 come after the flower falls a yellowish green at first, but 

 turning black as autumn comes. Cut by the sickle and 

 stored in the mow with the prairie-hay, the Indigo flower 



turns as black as night. In 

 its virgin vigor its leaves are 

 a mild-green, with a slight 

 touch of silvery stuff on the 

 surface. The Indigo flower 

 in bloom is beautiful enough 

 for the lawn of a palace, and 

 as blue as God's sky. 



There is no flower more 

 widely known than the sun- 

 flower. It will not long en- 

 dure the shade. Most of all 

 the prairie flowers, this one 

 is the offspring of the sun. 

 The bloom is fairly burnished 

 by the light. A field full of 

 sunflowers, full - blown, is 

 enough to kill a pessimist, 

 or cure him forever. When such a sea of brightest yellow 

 billows in the wind, my very soul swims out upon the scene. 

 That field is more mine than it is the man's who owns it, if he 

 be blind to beauty. Heaven, unblind him! 



104 



