“Ain’t it a purty play-act, though—a dum fine show?” gasped the old farmer who had “come, within the breadth of a cow’s thumb of shooting her” when he believed her flower-like feet to be those which had walked off in his floral slippers.
“Gosh! when, at early mornin’ the sweat’s rolling off’n a man, grubbing up rocks an’ stumps, and each one taken out means a fresh back ache, I dunno as I’ll miss the little morning glory trailin’ over the rock—jest opening its eye to the sun—seems as if, from now on, I’d see an’ not trample on it,” he murmured pathetically to himself.
“Well, it’s rising sunblink now, Si. Look!” said his wife beside him—his impressionable wife, who had on what he called her prim, muslin mouth that went with her Sunday dress—she pointed to the glaring mock-sun rising, red, flamboyant, behind pine tree and beech that, formed the background of the natural stage.
While in a bosky dell Treff Graham played Sun Father, manipulating those flamboyant effects, obtained by wiring the backs of the trees for electricity, in a twilight that by a long stretch of the imagination might be made to serve as dawn, not evening, another horological flower of those that favor the sand-man, was murmuring her winsome Reveille.
“I am the eye of summer days,
Once a great poet sang in praise
Of my gold heart and pink-tipt rays.”
“Daisy! Day’s Eye!” applauded the farmers’ wives delightedly, as fair-haired Dorothy flitted forth through the artificial sun-gates, a lovely composite of white ray florets rimming a shining, yellow heart.
While the Guardian, in lacy white as tall meadow-sweet, queen of the meadow, was explaining to rustic ears—of which about fifty pairs, in all, had assembled in the open-air theatre—that the yellow heart was a whole flower family in miniature, another girl, in azure, glided from behind a beech tree on to the stage with its borrowed plumes.
“By every dusty roadside see