"I can make it late?"
Webster climbed the fence of the forest under the foliage of a big tree of some unknown kind and descended waist-deep into the foliage of a weed with a leaf as big as an elephant's ear: it had a beautiful trumpet-shaped white and purple flower. He wished he knew what it was: on the very edge of the forest, at his very first step, he had sunk waist-deep into ignorance. Then he waded through the rank nightshade and stepped out upon the grass of the woods—the green carpet of thick turf, Kentucky bluegrass.
At last he was there under those softly waving trees which summer after summer he had watched from the porch and windows: long they had called to him and now he had answered their call.
But the disappointment! As he had looked at the forest across the distance, the tree-tops had made an unbroken billowy line of green along the blue horizon, continuous like the waves of the sea as he imagined the sea. Somewhere under that forest roof he had taken it for granted that there would be thick undergrowth, wild spots for shy singing nesting birds. The disappointment! The trees stood ten or twenty or thirty feet apart. The longest boughs barely touched each other, their lowest sometimes hung forty or fifty feet in the air. He did not see a tree whose branches he could reach with his upstretched arm. The sun shone everywhere under them every bright day and the grass grew thick up to their trunks.
Another disappointment! The wood was small. He walked to the middle of it and from there could see to its edge on each of its four sides. On one side was a field of yellow grain—what the grain was he did not know—ignorance again. On the side opposite this was a field of green grain—what he did not know. Straight ahead of him as he looked through the trees, he could see an open paddock on which the sunlight fell in a blazing sheen; it turned to silver the white flanks of some calves and made soft gold of the coats of grazing thoroughbreds. Beyond the paddock he could see stables and sheds and beyond these a farmhouse: he could faintly hear the cackle of barnyard poultry.
He stood in bluegrass pasture—once Kentucky wilderness. It was like an exquisite natural park. As he had skirmished toward the country along turnpikes with school-mates or other friends during his life, often his eyes had been drawn toward these world-famous bluegrass pastures. Now he was in one; and it was here that he had come to look for the warbler which haunts the secret forest solitudes!
He sat down under a big tree with a feeling of how foolish he had been. This was again followed by an overwhelming sense of his ignorance.
He did not know the kind of tree he sat under nor of any other that stood far or near. These were such as sugar maple and red oak and white oak and black ash and white ash and black walnut and white walnut—rarely white walnut—and hickory and locust and elm and a few haws: he did recognise a locust tree but then a locust tree grew in Jenny's yard! All around him weeds and wild flowers and other grasses sprang up out of the bluegrass: he did not know them.
There was one tree he curiously looked around for, positive that he should not be blind to it if fortunate enough to set his eyes on one—the coffee tree. That is, he felt sure he'd recognise it if it yielded coffee ready to drink, of which never in his life had they given him enough. Not once throughout his long troubled experience as to being fed had he been allowed as much coffee as he craved. Once, when younger, he had heard some one say that the only tree in all the American forest that bore the name of Kentucky was the Kentucky coffee tree; and he had instantly conceived a desire to pay a visit in secret to that corner of the woods. To take his cup and a few lumps of sugar and sit under the boughs and catch the coffee as it dripped down.... No one to hold him back ... as much as he wanted at last ...! The Kentucky coffee tree—his favourite in Nature!