Comforting and soothing as the touch of a loved hand on a fevered brow come the first cooling breezes of September after the fierce white heat of August. Sweeter than music is the sound of the wind, as it passes through the woods, welcomed by millions of waving branches and dancing leaves. It brings the call of the quail, the scream of the jay, the bark of the squirrel, the crack of the hunter's gun, the first notes of the returning bluebirds, the clean, keen scent of the earth after rain, the courage and joy of life, motion, action. Seen from the top of a cliff the acres of foliage spread out in the creek valley beneath has a motion suggesting the waves of the sea, now flowing in green billows before the wind, now whipped into spray at the shore of the creek where the willows show the white sides of their leaves.
In the fields the far-flung banners of the corn take on ripening tints and begin to rustle drily in the breeze. Golden ears, wrapped in tobacco-brown silk, are pushing from tanned and purplish husks. Newly-plowed fields were made possible by the rains which started the grass growing in the stubble, changing the color from amber to emerald and wrought a miracle of verdure in the pastures which August had baked brown. Here and there the aftermath of red clover has developed a field of new blossoms,—a little lake of pink where sunshine plays with shadow and sturdy humble bees spend the days in ecstasy.
Summer puts on her last bright robes for the final floral review before she is borne by the birds down the valley to set up her court in the southland. Tall and soldierly, this last gay army of the flowers passes in review before her. Blazing stars in pink and purple, tall and picturesque, with long rows of brilliant buttons; regiments of asters in blue and white and purple; rattle-snake root with big and quaintly slashed leaves and hundreds of tassels in delicate shades of lilac, purple and white; swamp sunflowers in dazzling yellow, camped in millions along the creek bottom to make it more glorious than the historical pageant of the Field of the Cloth of Gold; plumy battalions of golden-rod, marshalled by the sun along every country lane; companies of tall, saw-leaved sunflowers with golden petals and darker disks, deployed along the fences and seen at their best in the twilight when they look like friendly faces with beaming eyes; as I write them so they march across the land and bow farewell to summer. There is no floral spectacle in all the land so fine as this march of the composites over the Iowa prairies and fields in September. That is the judgment of those who have travelled and observed. In the swamps and along the ditches the blue lobelias flourish and the companies of blue gentians are bringing up the rear to end the floral review, begging the summer to wait until they pass by.
The little creek near which I live rises in a little swale between two rolling ridges of the pasture. When it leaves the pasture only a narrow box culvert is necessary to take it across the road, but before it reaches the river, twenty miles away, a double-spanned bridge is required to carry the road over it. In the pasture where it rises it fails to furnish enough water for the cattle, but half way along its course it sometimes washes out bridges in the springtime and farther down it often floods the lowlands. Slipping silently among the feet of the long grasses in the meadows it is scarcely seen at first; but by-and-by it attains the dignity of a stream, winding through meadows and bordering orchards and grain-fields. Now the willows begin to mark its course, then elms and oaks and walnuts with little thickets of panicled dogwood and wild plum, where the wild grape and the bittersweet display their fruit and the wild duck sometimes makes her nest.
"PAUSING IN EACH DEEP POOL TO COOL AND REFRESH ITSELF" (p. 109)
Sometimes the creek almost sinks from sight in a bed of hot sand; it leaves only a narrow runlet of water idling along the foot of the high bank and pausing in each deep pool at the feet of the overhanging trees to cool and refresh itself for its onward journey. To these quiet pools goes the fisherman with his minnow seine and a stick. He knows that in the water among the roots of the old tree lie shiners and soap minnows, creek chubs and soft-shelled "crawdads," the kind that make good bait for the black bass down in the river. He pokes around vigorously with his stick and sends them scurrying into his short seine. Hither also go the school-boy fishermen, with a willow pole and one gallus apiece, seeking to entice the patriarchal chub, the shiner and the stone-roller. From this point down, the young anglers are strung along the banks. Some try their luck for sunfish by the piles of loose rock and boulders, and some would tempt the bullheads from siestas in the mud.
Above the mill-dam the water backs up to form a peaceful pond which mirrors the trees and the rushes and cat-tails above it and sleeps beneath the thicket of willows where the redwings flock in the evenings. Broad leaves of the arrow-head and pickerel-weed give shelter to the coot, bobbing her head and neck as she makes nervous journeys through the water, sometimes scratching a long streak across its mirror-like surface as she uses both feet and wings in her haste to escape from the lone pedestrian. At sundown the sandhill crane may sometimes be surprised, standing like a silhouette by the shore of a grassy island. The awkward, wary bittern and the still more vigilant least bittern are familiar residents here.