HAY HARVEST TIME
[Illustration]
By the manifold hayfields only, were her wild-rose token banished, a
traveler returning from another land to our June, not knowing the time
of year, might name the month. In days just before hay harvest the
glistening dance of meadow grasses is most splendid, their soft
obedience to the winds is readiest. Deep rose plumes of sorrel, the
wine-colored red-top, smoky heads of timothy, are forever aripple, and,
though overstrewn with flowers, they reveal when bent beneath the step
of the southwest breeze a thousand lowlier flowers near the roots. Here
the "wild morning-glory," the tiny fields convolvulus, hides perilously
in the mowing; white clover and yellow five-finger are spread; the
grassflower holds up its single jewel. The swaying stems are trellises
to many a wandering vine; there are fairy arbors where a tired elf might
sleep guarded from the sun as well as in a jungle. Here, too, the wild
strawberries are ripening, not breathing yet the bouquet of July; but
the white wild strawberry, lover of the shades, has already reached its
pallid ripeness. Far beneath the moving surface of the grass ocean lies
a dim and mysterious world, lined with track and countertrack of the
beetle, caverns of the mole, and the unremaining castle of the ant. Here
the sleek woodchuck passes imperceptibly, the ingenuous cottontail finds
his brief paradise; small moths fold their wings and sleep.
Above are light, motion, and the clearest, strongest colors of the year,
untarnished by hot suns, unmixed with the later browns. The dark-eyed
yellow daisy, sun worshiper, rises amid the fresh brilliance of that
other starry-petaled weed which only sheep will eat. Celestial-blue
chicory wanders in from the roadside and will not thereafter be denied.
Yarrow with its balsam fragrance and fernlike leaf, the first delicate
wild carrot asway, goldfinch yellow of the moth mullein, cloverheads of
the Tyrian dye, sunny spray of mustard, lie scattered on the crests of
hayfield waves.
In the lowgrounds, on bowldered hillsides, far in the woods, wherever
the mowing machine will grant it a summer, spreads the exquisite wild
rose, dowered like other flowers of June--the water lily, the wild-grape
blossom, the syringa--with a perfume as wistfully sweet as the form and
hue of its chalice. That fragrance, unearthly, never fails to bring a
catch of the breath, a start of memory, when in whatever place it is
encountered again. You seldom find a wild rose withered; they cast their
petals down without a struggle, and a throng of ardent pink buds are
waiting on the bush. So it is with the water lily--when the hour strikes
she draws her green cloak once more about her and retires from the sun.
The meadow rue has shaken out veil upon floating veil in the woodlands.
The shaded knolls are sprinkled lavender with wild geraniums, willing
to be background for the May windflower or the buttercups of June. Among
the rocks, twinkling red and yellow in the sandy, sunny places, the
columbine swings her cups of honey impartially for glittering humming
bird and blunt-nosed, serious bee. Columbines are delicious--could anyone
regard them sensibly, and not as something animate and almost winged.
The claret-colored milkweed (a natural paradox) holds flowing nectar,
too, but there is a paler milkweed, so softly tinted of pink, yellow,
and white as to be no color at all, whereto the little yellow
butterflies drift to sip at dusk. The blossomed elder rests like white
fog in the hollows, scenting all the country ways and promising
elder-blossom wine, the dryad's draught. In moist and dark
retreats--under hemlocks and at the doors of caves--the ghost lamp is
lighted. In the brightest spot it can find the small blackberry lily
paints against the ledge its speckled orange star.
It is the time of perfect ferns, uncurled quickly from the brown balls,
and making our Northern woods tropical with the sumptuous brake and
temperate imitations of the tree fern. They fill the glades and scale
the cliffs. They mingle enchantingly along creeks and at the edge of the
pond with the regal hosts of the blue flag--the lavishly sown iris of the
meadows. They are matted close in the swamps, plumy on the hilltops.
From mosses on old logs spring ferns almost as faery as the fronds of
the moss itself.
[Illustration]
Into the whispering twilight of June come many creatures to play strange
games and sing such songs as even the many-stringed orchestra of the
sunlit hayfield does not know. The swooping bat darts from thick-hung
woodbine and noiselessly crosses the garden, brushes the hollyhocks, and
speeds toward the moon. Moths, white and pallid green, wander like
spirits among the peonies. Sometimes the humming bird shakes the trumpet
vine in the dark, queerly restless, though he is Apollo's acolyte. The
fireflies are lambently awing. The cricket's pleading, interrupted song
is half silenced by the steady, hot throb of the locust's. The tree
toad's eerie note comes faint and sweet, but from what cranny of the
bark he only knows. The mother bird, guardian even in sleep, speaks
drowsily to her children. From the brooding timber the owl sends his
call of despair across acres of friendly fields placid in the dew. June
nights are wakeful. Then enchantment deepens, for there comes no pause
in darkness for the joy of earth.