hawk, using the cloud as his lordly parasol. The
eagerness of spring gone, now all but incredible as having ever
existed; the birds hushed and hiding; the bee, so nimble once,
fallen asleep over his own cider-press in the shadow of the golden
apple. From the depths of the woods may come the notes of the
cuckoo; but they strike the air more and more slowly, like the
clack, clack of a distant wheel that is being stopped at the close
of harvest. The whirring wings of the locust let themselves go
in one long wave of sound, passing into silence. All nature is a
vast sacred goblet, filling drop by drop to the brim, and not to
be shaken. But the stalks of the later flowers begin to be stuffed
with hurrying bloom lest they be too late; and the nighthawk rapidly
mounts his stairway of flight higher and higher, higher and higher,
as though he would rise above the warm white sea of atmosphere and
breathe in cold ether.

Always in August my nature will go its own way and seek its own
peace. I roam solitary, but never alone, over this rich pastoral
land, crossing farm after farm, and keeping as best I can out of
sight of the laboring or loitering negroes. For the sight of them
ruins every landscape, and I shall never feel myself free till
they are gone. What if they sing? The more is the pity that any
human being could be happy enough to sing so long as he was a slave
in any thought or fibre of his nature.

Sometimes it is through the after-math of fat wheat-fields, where
float like myriad little nets of silver gauze the webs of the
crafty weavers, and where a whole world of winged small folk flit
from tree-top to tree-top of the low weeds. They are all mine--these
Kentucky wheat-fields. After the owner has taken from them his
last sheaf I come in and gather my harvest also--one that he did
not see, and doubtless would not begrudge me--the harvest of beauty.
Or I walk beside tufted aromatic hemp-fields, as along the shores
of softly foaming emerald seas; or past the rank and file of fields
of Indian-corn, which stand like armies that had gotten ready
to march, but been kept waiting for further orders, until at last
the soldiers had gotten tired, as the gayest will, of their yellow
plumes and green ribbons, and let their big hands fall heavily down
at their sides. There the white and the purple morning-glories
hang their long festoons and open to the soft midnight winds their
elfin trumpets.

This year as never befo