14 STARLIGHT AND SUNSHINE. 
What is the aftermath which the poet gleans in, 
his neighbor’s field ? 
“A second crop thy acres yield, 
Which I gather in a song,” 
sings Emerson. That is a poor and lifeless botany 
that is not written full with songs. 
Chaucer’s daisy was his favored companion; his 
devotion was unremitting. He met its opening 
fringes at the dawn; he lingered by it as it closed 
its eye at twilight. Sleeping or waking, noon or 
midnight, he could give an account of his protégée for 
every hour. How few of the proud followers, of Lin- 
nzus know how their erudition is mocked in 
the meadow masquerade, or what their 
hard-named minions are up to in 
the dark hours! 
My first midnight walk was a 
revelation, and a severe shock to 
my comfortable self-conceit. The 
woods and meadows had been full of 
faces that I had known and welcomed famil- 
iarly for years in my daily walks. But when 
I sallied forth with my lantern that night, I 
stepped from my threshold upon foreign 
sod. I found no greeting nor open 
palms, and I lost my way as though in 
a strange land. Indeed “is not the mid- 
night like Central Africa to most of us?” 
As I stood in perplexity scanning my sur- 
roundings in the meadow a strange form closely 
hooded beneath its folded leaves seemed to mur- 
mur at my elbow, and I listened. 
“Say not that you know a single one of us,” it 
said, in a roguish clover-scented whisper. “It is not 
ee 
