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It was the season of alpine Indian summer. The sun beamed lovingly; the squirrels were nutting in the pine-trees, butterflies hovered about the last of the goldenrods, the willow and maple thickets were yellow, the meadows brown, and the whole sunny, mellow landscape glowed like a countenance in the deepest and sweetest repose.
He can hunt in all the flowers to find these little pollen-boxes, some of which, as in the goldenrods, are so small that he will have hard work to find them, even though they shed such clouds of pollen. He can notice the different kinds of stamens, see how some have long stems or filaments, others short ones, others again none at all. The filament is of no other use than to hold up the anther.
Then Mother Carey smiled so softly and sweetly and said: "Little slender Goldenrods, I am going to give you something to do that will win you great honour among all who understand.
The sun rose clear, but there was a hint of frost in the air and the east wind was blowing. Ironweeds and goldenrods upon the hills bent low before it. The cotton fields looked dishevelled with white locks flying. The cornstalks, stripped long since of fodder, stood with down-hanging ears like rows of soldiers at attention with knapsacks upon their lean backs.
There are the violets that come so early in the spring, with their wildwood fragrance and dainty blue cloaks, and the lovely roses of summer, the goldenrods and asters of autumn, while among the rarer kinds we have the night-blooming cereus, the beautiful but slow blossoming century plant, and many others. These are types and symbols of ourselves and our process of birth and unfoldment.
The ground beneath the trees is covered with a luxuriant crop of grasses, chiefly triticum, bromus, and calamagrostis, with purple spikes and panicles arching to one's shoulders; while the open meadow patches glow throughout the summer with showy flowers, heleniums, goldenrods, erigerons, lupines, castilleias, and lilies, and form favorite hiding and feeding-grounds for bears and deer.
In midwinter, when most of the other trees are asleep, this cedar puts forth its flowers in millions, the pistillate pale green and inconspicuous, but the staminate bright yellow, tingeing all the branches and making the trees as they stand in the snow look like gigantic goldenrods.
But, however low their singing, it is always ineffably fine in tone, in harmony with the restful time of the year. The first snow of the season that comes to the help of the streams usually falls in September or October, sometimes even is the latter part of August, in the midst of yellow Indian summer when the goldenrods and gentians of the glacier meadows are in their prime.
"They will need a bit of yellow, also," remarked the Yellow Ryl; "I must fetch some of the yellow that I use to color my buttercups and goldenrods with." "The real cat is black," said the Black Ryl; "I will bring some of the black that I use to color the eyes of my pansies with, and then you can paint your wooden cat black."
On the Hickory Hill farm there is a ridge of moraine material, rather dry, but flowery with goldenrods and asters of many species, upon which we saw bees feeding in the late autumn just when their hives were fullest of honey, and it occurred to me one day after I was of age and my own master that I must try to find a bee tree.
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