High Woon 
crowded, communal. The odors mingle now and drift 
wide on the winds, and as wide on the hillsides spread 
the colors, gold and green and white, and, where the 
rocky pasture runs down to the woods, the pink of 
the steeple-bush, like a flush of dawn. 
Across my neighbor’s pasture lies this soft glory 
of the spireas all through July. It runs in irregular 
streams down tothe brook, rising there into a low- 
hanging bank of mist where the clustering spires of 
pink are interspersed with the taller, whiter meadow- 
sweet, — the “ willow-leaved spirea.” 
There are shadowy rooms in the deep woods where 
the spring lingers until the leaves of autumn begin 
to fall. Here, in July, I can find the little twin flow- 
ers Linnea and Mitchella, blossoms that should have 
opened with the bloodroot and anemone. But Life 
has largely fled the woods and left them empty and 
still. She is out in the open, along the roadsides, 
rioting in the sun. The time of her maidenhood 
is gone. She is entirely maternal now, bent on re- 
plenishing the earth, on reseeding it against all pos- 
sibility of death, She covers the ground with seed, 
and fills the very air with seed that the winds may 
sow. She has grown lusty, bold, almost defiant, no 
155 
