SUMMER. 59 



mist all through the blossoming maze. We heard the music of the 

 scythe, and, sitting in the deep cool grass beneath the maple shade, we 

 watched the circling motion of the mowers in the field — saw the forkfuls 

 of the hay tossed in the drying sun, and breathed the perfumed air that 

 floated from the windrows. We sauntered by the meadow brook where 

 willows gleamed along the bank, and overhanging alders threw their som- 

 bre shadows in the quiet pools : where the ground-nut, and the meadow- 

 rue, and the creeping madder fringed the tangled brink, and every foot- 

 step started up some agile frog that plunged into the unseen water. We 

 stood where rippling shallows gurgled, under festooned canopies of fox- 

 grape, and the leaning linden-trees shut out the sky o'erhead and inter- 

 twined their drooping branches above the gliding current. Here, too, 

 the weather-beaten crossing-pole makes its tottering span across the 

 stream, and deep down beneath the bank the rainbow-tinted sunfish floats 

 on filmy fins above his yellow bed of gravel, and we catch a flashing 

 gleam of a silvery dace or shiner turning in the water. 



Now we confront a rude slab fence, an ancient landmark, that termi- 

 nates its length at the edge of the stream, where its gray and crumbling 

 boards are secured with rusty nails against the trunk of a tall button- 

 wood-tree. A loosened slab is easily found, and we are soon upon the 

 other side ; and after picking our way through a forest of bush-elders, we 

 emerge upon an open lot of low flat pasture-land, known always as the 

 " old swamp meadow." No other five acres on the face of the earth are 

 so dear to me as this neglected field. I know its every rise and fall of 

 ground, its every bog, and its lush greenness is refreshing even to the 

 thought. 



It is a luxuriant garden of all manner of succulent and juicy vegeta- 

 tion ; an outbursting extravagance of plant life of almost tropical exuber- 

 ance. All New England's most majestic and ornamental flora seem con- 

 gregated in its congenial soil ; and even when a boy I learned to know 

 and love them all, and even call them by their names. 



Here are towering stems of iron-weed lifting high their scattered pur- 

 ple crowns, and in their midst the woolly clumps of boneset, its white 

 flowered cushions intermingling with the dense pink tufts of thorough- 

 wort. 



On every side we overlook whole patches of these splendid blossoms, 

 with their crests closely crowded in a mosaic of pink and white. And 

 here's a bed of peppermint and spearmint, interspersed with flaming 



