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Updated: June 22, 2025
One evening, as Richard, in displaying his collection, brought to view the blood-red leaf of a gum-tree, Asenath exclaimed "Ah, there is the sign! It is early, this year." "What sign?" he asked. "That the summer is over. We shall soon have frosty nights, and then nothing will be left for us except the asters and gentians and golden-rods." Was the time indeed so near?
It is not hard to climb in respect to steepness, but it is so tangled with bushes and vines, that one can scarce break through them. The open places were yellow with golden-rods, and the pale asters were plenty in the shade, and by the side of the brooks, that with pleasing noise did leap down the hill.
The golden-rods, it will be observed, are absent altogether from my list; and the same would have been true of the asters, but for a single plant. This, curiously enough, still bore five heads of tolerably fresh blossoms, after all its numberless companions, growing upon the same hillside, had succumbed to the frost.
They are mighty waving golden-rods, ever in tune, singing and writing wind-music all their long century lives. Little, however, of this noble tree-waving and tree-music will you see or hear in the strictly alpine portion of the forests. The burly Juniper whose girth sometimes more than equals its height, is about as rigid as the rocks on which it grows.
Are not the steep and dangerous rocky precipices by the side of the way to be daringly scaled and slid down? Do not the geese live in this pasture, and the sheep and the one solitary pig in that? The raspberry vines droop their rosy fruit into her hand, the tall, big, golden-rods snap their stalks so unexpectedly when she bends them, while she finds herself unable to gather the slender grasses.
Chill driving autumn storms had stripped the painted glories from the trees, and remorseless frosts had chased the hardy ranks of the asters and golden-rods back and back till scarce a blossom could be found in the deepest and most sequestered spots.
The Hemp-Bird often joins their parties, and his cheerful and well-known twitter may be heard, as he hurriedly flits from one bush to another, hunting for the seeds of the golden-rods and asters.
The ferns were whitish-gray and brown at the edges of the woods, and the asters and golden-rods which had lately looked so gay in the open fields stood now in faded, frost-bitten companies. There were busy flocks of birds flitting from field to field, ready to start on their journey southward. When we reached the house, to our surprise there was no one in sight and the place looked deserted.
The color-beauty about Shadow Lake during the Indian summer is much richer than one could hope to find in so young and so glacial a wilderness. Almost every leaf is tinted then, and the golden-rods are in bloom; but most of the color is given by the ripe grasses, willows, and aspens.
It is a land of birds and flowers; of rock roses, wild sunflowers, golden-rods; of wax-wings, orioles, sparrows, and eagles. Here roams the stealthy mountain lion. This region, too, has its delightful legends. One of these legends will awaken great curiosity as the State of Montana grows, and she seems destined to become the monarch of States.
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