end, and rich in corn, with its fodder garnered and
set in order over a broad field.

Perhaps I have added touches to this picture since the days when I was
a boy, but so far back as when I used to hunt out the deeply fluted
cornstalks to turn into fiddles, it was minor notes I played--the notes
of the wind coming over the field of corn-butts and stirring the loose
blades as it moved among the silent shocks. I have more than a memory
of mere corn, of heavy-eared stalks cut and shocked to shed the winter
rain: that, and more, as of the sober end of something, the fulfillment
of some solemn compact between us--between me and the fields and skies.

Is this too much for a boy to feel? Not if he is father to the man! I
have heard my own small boys, with grave faces, announce that this is
the 21st of June, the longest day of the year--as if the shadows were
already lengthening, even across their morning way.

If my spirit should return to earth as a flower, it would come a
four-o'clock, or a yellow evening primrose, for only the long afternoon
shadows or falling twilight would waken and spread my petals. No, I
would return an aster or a witch-hazel bush, opening after the corn is
cut, the crops gathered, and the yellow leaves begin to come sighing to
the ground.

At that word "sighing" many trusting readers will lay this essay down.
They have had more than enough of this brand of pathos from their youth
up.

"The 'sobbing wind,' the 'weeping rain,'--
'Tis time to give the lie
To these old superstitious twain--
That poets sing and sigh.

"Taste the sweet drops,--no tang of brine,
Feel them--they do not burn;
The daisy-buds, whereon they shine,
Laugh, and to blossoms turn"--

that is, in June they do; but do they in October? There are no daisies
to laugh in October. A few late asters fringe the roadsides; an
occasional bee hums loudly in among them; but there is no sound of
laughter, and no shine of raindrops in the broken hoary seed-stalks
that strew the way. If the daisy-buds _laugh_,--as surely they do in
June,--why should not the wind sob and the rain weep--as surely they
do--in October? There are days of shadow with the days of sunshine;
the seasons have their moods, as we have ours, and why should one be
accused of more sentiment than sense, and of bad rhetoric, too, in
yielding to the spirit of the empty woods till the slow, slanting rain
of October weeps, and the soughing wind