odor, balsamic, startling: the odor of those plumes and
stalks and blossoms from which is exuding freely the narcotic resin of
the great nettle. The nostril expands quickly, the lungs swell out
deeply to draw it in: fragrance once known in childhood, ever in the
memory afterward and able to bring back to the wanderer homesick
thoughts of midsummer days in the shadowy, many-toned woods, over into
which is blown the smell of the hemp-fields.

Who apparently could number the acres of these in the days gone by? A
land of hemp, ready for the cutting! The oats heavy-headed, rustling,
have turned to gold and been stacked in the stubble or stored in the
lofts of white, bursting barns. The heavy-headed, rustling wheat has
turned to gold and been stacked in the stubble or sent through the
whirling thresher. The barley and the rye are garnered and gone, the
landscape has many bare and open spaces. But separating these
everywhere, rise the fields of Indian corn now in blade and tassel;
and--more valuable than all else that has been sown and harvested or
remains to be--everywhere the impenetrable thickets of the hemp.

Impenetrable! For close together stand the stalks, making common cause
for soil and light, each but one of many, the fibre being better when
so grown--as is also the fibre of men. Impenetrable and therefore
weedless; for no plant life can flourish there, nor animal nor bird.
Scarce a beetle runs bewilderingly through those forbidding colossal
solitudes. The field-sparrow will flutter away from pollen-bearing to
pollen-receiving top, trying to beguile you from its nest hidden near
the edge. The crow and the blackbird will seem to love it, having a
keen eye for the cutworm, its only enemy. The quail does love it, not
for itself, but for its protection, leading her brood into its
labyrinths out of the dusty road when danger draws near. Best of all
winged creatures it is loved by the iris-eyed, burnish-breasted,
murmuring doves, already beginning to gather in the deadened tree-tops
with crops eager for the seed. Well remembered also by the long-flight
passenger pigeon, coming into the land for the mast. Best of all wild
things whose safety lies not in the wing but in the foot, it is loved
by the hare for its young, for refuge. Those lithe, velvety,
summer-thin bodies! Observe carefully the tops of the still hemp: are
they slightly shaken? Among the bases of those stalks a cotton-tail is
threading its way inward beyond re