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Updated: June 19, 2025
With explosive "chips" flaming and flashing, he met dangers that sent all the other birds beside the shining river racing to cover. Concealment he scorned; and repose he never knew. It was a summer full of rich experience for the Cardinal. After these first babies were raised and had flown, two more nests were built, and two other broods flew around the sumac.
Down behind the dusty sumac shrubbery lies the little blue-green cottage said to have been used by Benjamin West as a studio. In a meadow beside the road two cows were grazing in the blue shadow of overhanging woodland. Over the road leans a flat outcrop of stone, known locally as "The Bum's Rock."
Silent he is, as when halted by the edge of the sumac wood, and in exactly the same attitude; the only change observable being his hat, which is a little more slouched over his face, now quite concealing it. But the two causes assigned are not the only ones why they have been so long in reaching the spot where they now are. There is a third influencing the gaucho.
Teola lifted the infant, and kissed it passionately, bending her head over it, praying. Tess could not enter upon such a holy scene. She sank down upon the turf. The basket yawned upon a bed of moss, its flannel rags hanging over the edge. Teola was making the babe ready to return to its bed, when Tess slipped under the branches of the short sumac trees, and entered the clearing.
There, at the side of the road, near the clump of blackberry vines and sumac growth, lay my father, a long dark blot, motionless, awesome, as I could see by the light of the moon, now just rising in a gap of the distant mountains. I sprang down and ran to him, lifted his head, called to him in a voice so hoarse I did not recognize it.
He complains querulously at being disturbed, flirts his tail and flies. Stout branches of sumac, with bark colored and textured much like brown egg-shell, sustain a canopy of wild grape, the clusters of green fruit only partly hidden by the broad leaves. Curiously beautiful are the sumac's leaves, showing long leaf-stalks of pink purple and pretty leaflets strung regularly on either side.
And even as a lad, and for the sport of it, have I followed and found by its scent alone the great night-butterfly, marked brown and crimson, and larger than a little bat, whose head bears tiny ferns, and whose wings are painted with the four quarters of the moon. Like crushed sumac is the odour of it, and in winter it hides in a bag of silk."
There were no more thick woods, the road running in a blaze of sunshine past clumps of cedars and wayside tangles of blackberry, sumac, and elder. Presently, beyond a group of elms, came into sight the goodly college of William and Mary, and, dazzling white against the blue, the spire of Bruton church.
And all this glory of hickory and oak, of sumac and creeper, of burning berries on dogwood and ilex and elder this sunset of the seasons but the preparation for another dawn?
The Cardinal had not known that the coming of the mate he so coveted would fill his life with such unceasing gladness, and yet, on the very day that happiness seemed at fullest measure, there was trouble in the sumac. He had overstayed his time, chasing a fat moth he particularly wanted for his mate, and she, growing thirsty past endurance, left the nest and went to the river.
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