"THE FRAGRANCE OF THE MILKWEED AT EVENING" (p. 54)
VIII.—BY THE RIVERSIDE IN AUGUST
When morning broke, little wisps of mist, like curls of white smoke, were drifting on the surface of the river as it journeyed through the canyon of cliffs and trees, dark as the walls of night, toward the valley where the widening sea of day was slowly changing from gray to rosy gold. Caught in a cove where the water was still these little wisps gathered together and crept in folds up the face of the cliff, as if they fain would climb to the very top where the red cedars ran like a row of battlements, twisting their stunted trunks over the brink and hanging their dark foliage in a fringe eighty feet above the water. But the cliff had for centuries defied all climbers, though it gave footing here and there to a few friendly plants. At its base the starry-rayed leaf-cup shed a heavy scent in the stillness of the moist morning. Higher, at the entrance to a little cave, the aromatic spikenard, with purple stems and big leaves, stood like a sentinel. From crannies in the limestone wall the harebell hung, its last flowers faded, but its foliage still delicately beautiful, like the tresses of some wraith of the river, clinging to the grim old cliff, and waiting, like Andromeda, for a Perseus. Tiny blue-green leaves of the cliff-brake, strung on slender, shining stems, contrasted their delicate grace with the ruggedness of the old cliff. Still higher, where a little more moisture trickled down from the wooded ridge above, the walking fern climbed step by step, patiently pausing to take new footings by sending out roots from the end of each long, pointed leaf. Near the top of the cliff, where the red cedars gave some shade, little communities of bulb-bearing ferns and of polypody displayed their exquisite fronds, as welcome in a world of beauty as smiles on a mother's face. Mosses and lichens grew here and there, staining the face of the old cliff gray, green and yellow. These tiny ferns and mosses, each drawing the sort of sustenance it needed from the layers of the limestone, seemed greater than the mountain of rock. Imposing and spectacular, yet the rock was dead,—the mausoleum for countless forms of the old life that ceased to be in ages long forgotten. These fairy forms that sprang from it were the beginnings of the new life, the better era, the cycle of the future, living, breathing, almost sentient things, transforming the stubborn stone into beauty of color and form, into faith that moves mountains and hope that makes this hour the center of all eternity. For them the river had been patiently working through the centuries, scoring its channel just a little deeper, cutting down ever so little each year the face of the cliff. Eternity stretched backward to the time when the little stream running between the thin edges of the melting ice sheets at the top of the high plateau first began to cut the channel and scarp this mighty cliff; still backward through untold ages to the time when the lowest layer of limestone in the cliff was only soft sediment on the shore of a summer sea. Eternity stretched forward, also, to the time when this perpendicular wall shall have been worn to a gentle slope, clad with luxuriant verdure, and adorned, perchance, with fairer flowers than any which earth now knows; still forward through other untold ages to the time when all earth's fires shall have cooled; when wind, rain, storm and flood, shall have carried even the slope to the sea and made this planet a plain like Mars. Now is the golden age; this hour is the center of eternity.
Red tints of the sunrise brightened into yellow, then followed the white light of an August day. Now the morning mist has gone; woods, fields and river lie silent in the hot, bright, apathetic morning. Peace reigns over the smiling fields where Plenty pours from her golden horn. Here, on the ridge at the top of the cliff, the woods stretch back half a mile to meet the prairie. Straight down from the red cedars on the brink of the rock the river softly eddies round a huge boulder,—the remnant of some cliff tragedy countless years ago. In the rent of the rock from which it fell a turkey-buzzard often sits and spreads her huge wings as the boats glide by. Storms have scalloped pockets in the softer strata; in them still hang the phoebe's nests, which were filled with young birds in June. Here and there a swallow's hole may be seen in the rock; earlier in the season the young birds often peeped out from these holes as if wishing for strength to come speedily to their wings. Across the river there is a wide beach where the low water makes ripple-marks in the sand. Narrow leaves of sand-bar willows fringe the shore, and back of these are the shining leaves of the oaks. Down the river there are glimpses of the fields,—yellow stubble where the grain has been cut, serried ranks of the green and tan where the far-flung guidons of the tasselled corn stretch away up the slope like a mighty army to demolish the cloud-castles of refuge on the far horizon where the mists fled for safety from the pursuing rays of the sun. Overhead the oak-leaves are motionless, like the comforting, brooding wings of Peace. It is a time for rest and quiet joy in the beauty and the fulness of the year. Now, in the grateful shade of some friendly old oak, is the time to "loaf and invite my soul."
