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


A line of mowers cutting the rowen whistled ceaselessly a jingling tune; at the end of each swath they stopped, sharpened their scythes, and rhythmically hammered them. The people could not be seen in the mist; only the sickles, the scythes, and the songs hummed together like the notes of invisible music.

The flower-woman at the gate of her garden had now only autumnal blooms for sale in the vases which flanked the entrance; the windrows of the rowen, left steeping in the dews overnight, exhaled a faint fragrance; a poor remnant of the midsummer multitudes trailed itself along to the various cafes of the valley, its pink paper bags of bread rustling like sere foliage as it moved.

The flower-woman at the gate of her garden had now only autumnal blooms for sale in the vases which flanked the entrance; the windrows of the rowen, left steeping in the dews overnight, exhaled a faint fragrance; a poor remnant of the midsummer multitudes trailed itself along to the various cafes of the valley, its pink paper bags of bread rustling like sere foliage as it moved.

"Yes," I said, "I have already had two or three crops from that field." "Huh!" said Horace. "I've cut the grass and I've cut the rowen every year since you bin here. What's more, I've got the money fer it in the bank." He tapped his fingers on the top of the wall. "Nevertheless, Horace," said I, "I've got my crops, also, from that field, and a steady income, too." "What crops?"

There were stretches of wild thyme purpling long barren acreages, and growing up the railroad banks almost to the rails themselves. From the meadows the rowen, tossed in long loose windrows, sent into their car a sad autumnal fragrance which mingled with the tobacco smoke, when two fat smokers emerged into the narrow corridor outside their compartments and tried to pass each other.

In the meadows the peasants were piling their carts with heavy rowen, the girls lifting the hay on the forks, and the men giving themselves the lighter labor of ordering the load. From the upturned earth, where there ought to have been troops of strutting crows, a few sombre ravens rose.

It is soft as the autumn rowen, and mixed with all the delicate, fragrant herbs of the marsh. The tang of the sea salt is in it, and no man knows what delicate essence borne far on the wandering tides to the flavoring of its fibre.

"I've rarely seen anything more beautiful," I said, "than this field and the view across it I'm taking that crop now, and later I shall gather in the rowen of goldenrod and aster, and the red and yellow of the maple trees and store it all away in my bank to live on next winter."

But it was a most walkable afternoon, and the pleasant road into the region which the station-master indicated as that I was seeking invited the foot by its level stretch, sometimes under wayside trees, but mostly between open fields, newly reaped and still yellow with their stubble, or green with the rowen clover.

Happy the author whose earliest works are read and understood by the lustre thrown back upon them from his latest! for then we receive the impression of continuity and cumulation of power, of peculiarity deepening to individuality, of promise more than justified in the keeping: unhappy, whose autumn shows only the aftermath and rowen of an earlier harvest, whose would-be replenishments are but thin dilutions of his fame!