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At the back stretched a meadow, part of which had been cut for hay; the rest of it was so full of weeds and wild flowers, ragweed, burdock and the red stalks of sorrel, that it had been left untouched, and filled the foreground with colour. The grass had gone to seed and turned a rich reddish purple; beneath it grew wild geraniums whose leaves were already scarlet.
The sheaf grows under her fingers, it is bound about with a girdle of twisted stalks, in which mingle the green bine of convolvulus and the pink-streaked bells that must fade. Heat comes down from above; heat comes up from beneath, from the dry, white earth, from the rows of stubble, as if emitted by the endless tubes of cut stalks pointing upwards.
God will not do it by piecemeal, God will not do it by small skirmish. He will wait until all the troops are massed, and then some day when in defiant and confident mood, at the head of his army, this Goliath of hell stalks forth, our champion, the son of David, will strike him down, not with smooth stones from the brook, but with fragments from the Rock of Ages.
But I am told they do nibble away at the short stalks and roots of corn or sugar-cane left in the ground when the crop was cut, and in this way manage to eke out a scanty existence. They are at best little but skin and bone. When it is merely a question of keeping life in the body, man and beast alike prove that but little is required.
Six dogs were thrown in, and the roots and stalks of the prairie plants, together with salt, and bunches of the wild pepper-plant, and of swamp mustard, were added for seasoning. Through the reserves round about for many miles swarthy heralds proclaimed that the great Chief Big Bear was giving a White Dog feast to his braves before summoning them to the war-path.
He stared at the miniature forest of blade and leaf beneath his eyes, and could hear faint rustlings as tiny insects thrust their way through it or climbed aimlessly up stalks that only led them into air.
So we dined on hard bread and black coffee, and our forlorn beasts walked languidly about, cropping the dry stalks of weeds and the juiceless roots of the dead grass. We crossed the river next morning, and took a road following its course, and shaded with willows and sycamores. The lofty, wooded ranges of the Mysian Olympus lay before us, and our day's work was to pass them.
Captain Ortis, I have issued my commands! Everything must be done, when I return; Lieutenant, you have your orders!" He rushed from the death-chamber to the sitting-room in his own house, and hastily tore stalks and blossoms from the plants. The maid-servants watched him timidly, and he harshly ordered them to collect what he had gathered and take them to the house of death.
I might assign many reasons for this modest course, all of them plausible, and some of them indeed quite dignified. I like dignity: any man who has lived the greater part of his life in a colony is so accustomed to it, that he becomes quite enamoured of it, and wrapping himself up in it as a cloak, stalks abroad the "observed of all observers."
Yonder the orange predominates in the showy flowers of the asclepia; and beyond, the eye roams over the pink blossoms of the cleome. The breeze stirs them. Millions of corollas are waving their gaudy standards. The tall stalks of the helianthus bend and rise in long undulations, like billows on a golden sea. They are at rest again.
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