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Updated: September 7, 2025
He catches pictures only of beautiful objects: swaying stalks of goldenrod, flights of thistle-down, lichen on old stone walls, barks of trees, oak-leaves, bunches of acorns, single sprays of apple-blossoms. Last Spring he found two robins building a nest in a cherry-tree: he placed his camera near them, and attaching a fine wire to spring the shutter, took a picture of Mr. and Mrs.
Lloyd waltzed off with Ranald, as light on her feet as a bit of thistle-down, and the old doctor's eyes followed her fondly. "She's like Amanthis," he said to himself. "And she will grow more like her as the years go by, so spirited and high-strung. But they'll have to watch her, or she'll wear herself out."
The lustre of the season begins to dim, the foliage of the trees and woods to tarnish, the plumage of the birds to fade, and their songs to cease. The hints of approaching fall are on every hand. How suggestive this thistle-down, for instance, which, as I sit by the open window, comes in and brushes softly across my hand!
Thousands of glittering fragments were flying around them in all directions but with no more noise than is made by so many light flakes of thistle-down floating about some warm afternoon in summer.
But her seductive softness is the last climax of magnificent strength. The same mathematical law winds the leaves around the stem and the planets round the sun. The same law of crystallization rules the slight-knit snow-flake and the hard foundations of the earth. The thistle-down floats secure upon the same summer zephyrs that are woven into the tornado.
She paused, and eagerly the mare stepped up to her, nuzzleing her caressing hand. Then, with a bound, the girl was on the graceful creature's back, landing in her place as lightly as a wind-blown thistle-down, as gracefully as a fairy horsewoman. "Heavens!" cried Barbara. "She's on Queen Bess!" "She'll be killed!" Miss Alathea screamed, in terror.
A summer shower was, of course, "a month" to them, a day of rain like weeks of holiday by the sea.... But, most of all, they enjoyed the rough-and-tumble nonsense of the violent weather, when they were tied together by the ropes of running wind; for these were visiting days all manner of strangers dropped in upon them from distant walks in life, and they never knew whether the next would be a fir-cone or one of those careless, irresponsible travellers, a bit of thistle-down....
'If I could have tried my plan of weaving cordage out of cotton-grass and thistle-down, I think I could have contrived for them. Mary looked up, and met his merry blue eye. Was he saying it so gravely to try whether he could take her in?
A few of the working gang managed to reach it and save themselves, but others were swept away like thistle-down. The boys thus rudely awakened from a sound sleep sprang up with frightened questionings, while Solon sank to his knees, paralyzed with terror. Nanita stood guard over her puppy, while Bim, with a single bark of defiance, leaped to his master's side and looked into his face for orders.
People seem to think that a few Polonius-like apophthegms delivered at such a time may be of great importance. They may be, perhaps, if they be backed-up and enforced by previous years of silent and self-denying example; otherwise they are like seed sown upon a rock, like thistle-down blown by the wind across the sea.
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