."

The day was yet young when she sighed again:

"I'm afraid, O Man, that your signs are of no avail. People have
forgotten how to read, these days."

I went out on the porch. A city nymph, in cool summer gown and picture
hat, paused before one of my newly reared warnings and read it through
with care. Profound deliberation characterized her movements. She was
statuesquely tall, but with a toss of the head and a flirt of the skirt
she dropped on hands and knees, crawled under the fence, and came to her
feet on the inside with poppies in both her hands. I walked down the
drive and talked ethically to her, and she went away. Then I put up more
signs.

At one time, years ago, these hills were carpeted with poppies. As
between the destructive forces and the will "to live," the poppies
maintained an equilibrium with their environment. But the city folk
constituted a new and terrible destructive force, the equilibrium was
overthrown, and the poppies wellnigh perished. Since the city folk
plucked those with the longest stems and biggest bowls, and since it is
the law of kind to procreate kind, the long-stemmed, big-bowled poppies
failed to go to seed, and a stunted, short-stemmed variety remained to
the hills. And not only was it stunted and short-stemmed, but sparsely
distributed as well. Each day and every day, for years and years, the
city folk swarmed over the Piedmont Hills, and only here and there did
the genius of the race survive in the form of miserable little flowers,
close-clinging and quick-blooming, like children of the slums dragged
hastily and precariously through youth to a shrivelled and futile
maturity.

On the other hand, the poppies had prospered in my field; and not only
had they been sheltered from the barbarians, but also from the birds.
Long ago the field was sown in wheat, which went to seed unharvested each
year, and in the cool depths of which the poppy seeds were hidden from
the keen-eyed songsters. And further, climbing after the sun through the
wheat stalks, the poppies grew taller and taller and more royal even than
the primordial ones of the open.

So the city folk, gazing from the bare hills to my blazing, burning
field, were sorely tempted, and, it must be told, as sorely fell. But no
sorer was their fall than that of my beloved poppies. Where the grain
holds the dew and takes the bite from the sun the soil is moist, and in
such soil it is easier to pull the poppies out b