United States or Yemen ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


Hare rolled into his blanket and stretched out with slow aching relief. He dreamed he was a boy roaming over the green hills of the old farm, wading through dewy clover-fields, and fishing in the Connecticut River. It was the long vacationtime, an endless freedom.

On every side the robins shouted their joy from the treetops, the bob-o'-links tinkled their fairy bells as they wheeled above the clover-fields; and from the dainty line of white-stemmed birches that guarded the stream came the mingled even-song of the frogs and the veeries. There was but one pedestrian on Champlain's Road this quiet evening.

An inarticulate music a chant telling of the sunlit hours that have gone and the shadows that floated under the clouds over the beautiful wheat. No more shall the tall stems wave in the wind or listen to the bees seeking the clover-fields. The lark that sang above the green corn, the partridge that sheltered among the yellow stalks, the list of living things delighting in it all have departed.

And often, almost continually, indeed, since then, the bees kept coming thither, Heaven knows why, or by what pertinacious desire, for far-fetched sweets, when, no doubt, there were broad clover-fields, and all kinds of garden growth, much nearer home than this.

I am always thinking that I never tasted coffee till that day; I am always thinking of the crisp and steaming rolls, ored over with the molten gold that hinted of the clover-fields, and the bees that had not yet permitted the honey of the bloom and the white blood of the stalk to be divorced; I am always thinking that the young and tender pullet we happy three discussed was a near and dear relative of the gay patrician rooster that I first caught peering so inquisitively in at the kitchen door; and I am always always thinking of "The Nest-egg."

"`Be wise, says the farmer's wife, `for the clover-field beyond is belonging to a giant, and if you leave in the cows, he will kill you dead. "`Never fear, says the good son, `I don't sleep at my work. "And he goes out in the field and lugs a big stone up in the tree, and then sends every cow far out in the clover-fields and goes back again to the tree!

The soul seems a sweet-spiced shrub, and every leaf is perfumed. If in dull, obscure hours the soul was like a wooden beehive drifted o'er with snow, in its vision-hours the soul is like a glass hive out of which the bees go singing into sweet clover-fields. In these hours how unworthy the material life! How insubstantial the things of iron, wood and stone!

Mokry in his new suit, made by the noted tailor of Besztercebánya, with his hat in one hand, and in the other the pistol he had fired as a farewell greeting. On the other side of the road was the dangerous windmill, its enormous sails throwing shadows over the flowering clover-fields. Luckily it was not moving now, and looked like an enormous fly pinned on the blue sky.

That little region resembles a blooming garden; luxuriant corn and clover-fields are enclosed, with hedges of hazels and wild roses; the peasants' houses are surrounded by large apple- orchards, full of fruit. Wood and hill alternate. Now we see the ocean, and now the narrow Lesser Belt, which resembles a river.

The great clover-fields, now red with bloom, looked like a mighty spreading of strawberry-land ready for the pickers; and a red bird, arising from the ground, might have been a bloom of a berry suddenly endowed with wings.