16 STARLIGHT AND SUNSHINE. 
every individual leaf below bowed with folded palms. The white 
clovers were similarly well brought up, and continued their ves- 
pers through the livelong night, their little praying bands to be 
seen everywhere along the path. The yellow hop clover played 
all sorts of antics with its leaves without seeming rhyme or 
reason. The tall bush clover, rising here and there among the 
slumberous beds, presented a complete surprise, being entirely 
changed from its diurnal aspect, the ordinary generous leafy 
spread of foliage now assuming the shape of an upright wand, 
each three-foliate leaf being raised upon its stem, with the leaf- 
lets folded inward, clasping the maternal stalk. It had its arms 
full indeed, and seemed conscious of its heavy responsibility. The 
trailing ground-nut vine and the delicate wild bean were hardly 
recognizable in their odd night-dress; and the desmodiums at 
the border of the woods presented a singular contrast of drooping 
listlessness, with each leaflet hanging as vertically as a plummet. 
I sought the familiar plumy beds of the little partridge-pea, won- 
dering what sort of a reception I would meet from that quarter, 
but I found these plants even more fast asleep and transformed 
than their drowsy neighbors, and had trodden on a number of the 
plants ere I discerned them, for, like the sensitive mimosa, which 
they so much resemble, and which 
“opened its fan-like leaves to the light, 
And closed them beneath the kisses of night,” 
these tiny leaflets were now folded in a long flat ribbon for each 
leaf, presenting thin edges to the sky, and hardly distinguishable 
from the thin seed-pods among them. Nor were these all. Folded 
leaves and strange sleeping forms were nodding about me on 
every hand as I walked this dreamy realm —acres of “billowy 
| drowse” nursed in the cradle of a zephyr. What sort of a “ wide- 
awake” poet was that, I mused, who lamented from his troubled 
pillow: 
“A flock of sheep that leisurely pass by 
One after one; the sound of rain, and bees 
Murmuring; the fall of rivers, winds, and seas; 
