y, stroking them with the brushes of
light, prodding them with spears of flame. Drops of nightly dews, drops
from the coursing clouds, trickle down to them, moistening the dryness,
closing up the little hollows of the ground, drawing the particles of
maternal earth more closely. Suddenly--as an insect that has been
feigning death cautiously unrolls itself and starts into action--in
each seed the great miracle of life begins. Each awakens as from a
sleep, as from pretended death. It starts, it moves, it bursts its
ashen woody shell, it takes two opposite courses, the white,
fibril-tapered root hurrying away from the sun; the tiny stem, bearing
its lance-like leaves, ascending graceful, brave like a palm.

Some morning, not many days later, the farmer, walking out into his
barn lot and casting a look in the direction of his field, sees--or
does he not see?--the surface of it less dark. What is that uncertain
flush low on the ground, that irresistible rush of multitudinous green?
A fortnight, and the field is brown no longer. Overflowing it, burying
it out of sight, is the shallow tidal sea of the hemp, ever rippling.
Green are the woods now with their varied greenness. Green are the
pastures. Green here and there are the fields: with the bluish green of
young oats and wheat; with the gray green of young barley and rye: with
orderly dots of dull dark green in vast array--the hills of Indian
maize. But as the eye sweeps the whole landscape undulating far and
near, from the hues of tree, pasture, and corn of every kind, it turns
to the color of the hemp. With that in view, all other shades in nature
seem dead and count for nothing. Far reflected, conspicuous, brilliant,
strange; masses of living emerald, saturated with blazing sunlight.

Darker, always darker turns the hemp as it rushes upward: scarce darker
as to the stemless stalks which are hidden now; but darker in the tops.
Yet here two shades of greenness: the male plants paler, smaller,
maturing earlier, dying first; the females darker, taller, living
longer, more luxuriant of foliage and flowering heads.

A hundred days from the sowing, and those flowering heads have come
forth with their mass of leaves and bloom and earliest fruits, elastic,
swaying six, ten, twelve feet from the ground and ripe for cutting. A
hundred days reckoning from the last of March or the last of April, so
that it is July, it is August. And now, borne far through the steaming
air floats an