We are most apt to remember and cherish the flowers which appear earliest in the spring. I look with equal affection on those which are the latest to bloom in the fall.
The choke-berry (Pyrus arbutifolia).
The beautiful white waxen berries of the cornel, either Cornus alba or paniculata, white-berried or panicled, beautiful both when full of fruit and when its cymes are naked; delicate red cymes or stems of berries; spreading its little fairy fingers to the skies, its little palms; fairy palms they might be called.
One of the viburnums, Lentago or pyrifolium or nudum, with its poisonous-looking fruit in cymes, first greenish-white, then red, then purple, or all at once.
The imp-eyed, red, velvety-looking berry of the swamps.[54]
The spotted polygonum (Polygonum Persicaria), seen in low lands amid the potatoes now, wild prince’s-feather (?), slight flower that does not forget to grace the autumn.
The late whortleberry—dangleberry—that ripens now that other huckleberries and blueberries are shrivelled and spoiling, September 1st; dangle down two or three inches; can rarely find many. They have a more transparent look, large, blue, long-stemmed, dangling, fruit of the swamp concealed.
I detect the pennyroyal which my feet have bruised. Butter-and-eggs still hold out to bloom.
I notice that cows never walk abreast, but in single file commonly, making a narrow cow-path, or the herd walks in an irregular and loose wedge. They retain still the habit of all the deer tribe, acquired when the earth was all covered with forest, of travelling from necessity in narrow paths in the woods.
At sundown a herd of cows, returning homeward from pasture over a sandy knoll, pause to paw the sand and challenge the representatives of another herd, raising a cloud of dust between the beholder and the setting sun. And then the herd boys rush to mingle in the fray and separate the combatants, two cows with horns interlocked, the one pushing the other down the bank.