I understand that the golden rod is listed among the injurious weeds of Ontario, but I have a very tender spot for it in my heart. I have never heard any one complaining much about it or putting in a hoed crop to get rid of it, so I do not think it can be very bad. Of course it makes the fence corners look neglected during the summer months, but at this season of the year when it is in bloom it is a delight to the eye. I am told that those afflicted with hay fever have a special grudge against this weed, or flower, but as I have heard hay fever attributed to almost everything from the first violet to the last asters I am not sure that they are right in their diagnosis. Anyway, I am as fond of the golden rod as of the chrysanthemum, and I think that those people who advocate having it adopted for the national flower show excellent taste. The golden rod is now in its glory, and though there may be too much of it to please careful farmers there can never be too much for our artists. It should be allowed to grow in all our parks, for there are no flowers that give a richer touch of colour to the landscape.
Oct. 21.—The days we are having now are not only worth describing separately, but worth living separately. Each one is complete in itself. Take to-day, for instance. When I opened one eye sleepily and looked out—the tent-flap had been open all night—the "rosy-fingered dawn" was busy in the east. Light, smoky clouds were stretched along the horizon, and while they slowly changed to ribbons of ruddy flame I caught the first glimpse of
"The great, deliberate sun
Counting his hill-tops one by one."
Probably I dozed off again, for when I opened my eyes wide in what seemed a moment later the sun was clear of the clouds and the day had begun. All the grass and ground vegetation was white with hoarfrost. As I walked to the mushroom bed that had been made in a patch of sod in the corner of the garden I could feel and hear it crunching underfoot. Of course, the night had been too cold for mushrooms, but before leaving the subject I want to put on record the fact that among those gathered from this bed yesterday was one beauty that measured seventeen inches in circumference. No, I am not living entirely on mushrooms these days.
What seemed the most remarkable event of this morning was the singing of a robin that had perched on the top of a spruce tree. It sang as robins sing in the early spring. As I had not heard one for months, it made the morning start off "cheerily, cheerily, cheerily!" Crows were cawing in that emphatic way they have when they appear to be saying something, and every now and then a meadow-lark flung its musical cry across the fields.
When breakfast was over the frost had disappeared and the chill had left the air. There was a minute of indecision in which we argued whether to haul in corn or to dig the potatoes. It was finally decided to go at the potatoes, as they were planted on a clay knoll and would come out cleaner if dug when the ground was dry than if left until after a rain. The corn could wait. With pails and potato forks we started across the pasture, with the sun behind us, towards a fringe of maple trees. The colours of the landscape ranged from the tender green of a near-by wheatfield to the violent crimson of one bushy maple at the edge of the pasture. The gently-stirring air was full of autumn odours, autumn sounds, autumn touches. There was something to delight every sense. It was a perfect Canadian October day.
The belated harvest of the corn and vegetables is really the most delightful of the year, though people often let it become the most disagreeable. Because there is no particular hurry about husking the corn or getting in the roots and vegetables, many people linger over the work until the bad weather catches them. It is safe to say that every fall there is enough good weather for this work, but it is such beautiful, lazy, deceitful weather that they dawdle through it until it ends in a storm, and then they pick their roots and potatoes with wet, red, cracked, and chilled hands, and perhaps sit in a snowdrift and husk their corn. The potatoes we were digging were not so big as those that proud farmers send to the office of The Farmer's Advocate to show what can be done by scientific methods, but they were of the clean, smooth variety that you like to get baked with a chop and kidney. They came out of the dry ground free from clay, and it was not long before the pile began to look like good eating. I had not picked many bushels, however, before I began to be glad that the day was so beautiful, and that nature about me had so many charms that one had to straighten up to observe and talk about. Picking potatoes is a job that should be done by a man of the kind described by Lincoln, when he said that the fellow's legs were barely long enough to reach to the ground. Mine are altogether too long for this work, and stooping to pick even the finest potatoes gets tiresome.
A frog was heard croaking in the long grass, and I knew from the sound he was making that a garter snake was slowly swallowing him. A careful search failed to locate the scene of the tragedy, but it rested my back.
The potato patch is in a little clearing that extends into the woods from the south, and when the October sun got nicely warmed up to its work I doubt if there was a hotter spot in western Ontario. That gave me an excuse to walk home for a drink of water. I was almost discouraged when I saw the number of potatoes that had been uncovered during my absence. When I was about ready to drop from exhaustion a stray hen began to cackle in the distance. Her nest had to be found, of course. More rest. By this time I was not so much surprised that people put off digging their potatoes until after the snow fell. A black squirrel that stole out of the woods and stole an ear of corn and then stole back to the woods with it afforded a few minutes of restful nature-study. Still the pile grew and was good to look at. The pailfuls of potatoes got heavier every trip that was made to the pit, and I was thinking of going home to get the children's express cart when a mourning dove flew across; but he was too brisk to be interesting. In fact he was not mourning at all. I was. Just about the time I was beginning to wonder if some one had not commanded the sun to stand still so as to give us an interminable forenoon, the call for dinner was heard. I responded as quickly as the hired man who blew up the factory by letting go of the can of dynamite he was lifting the moment he heard the whistle blow.
In the afternoon the nature-study continued, and the thermometer registered eighty-two in the shade. I hate to think what it must have registered out there in the sun. A great flock of crows went flapping across the south-west early in the afternoon, and it was quite comfortable to sit back on the edge of a furrow and watch them and wonder where they were going, but the last one trailed past and then I began to wonder why people eat so many potatoes. There are doctors who say that too much starchy food is not good for one. I wish I had met one in the spring before we planted the potatoes and had been convinced by him that this is true. The chief trouble in this world is that we do so much needless work, but there is a proverb that unless we work we cannot eat. Oh, well, the patch is not so very big, after all, and a good rush will finish it. By the time it was finished I was beginning to feel proud of the pile I had gathered, and was almost sorry to lend a hand in covering it with straw and earth, because that hid the potatoes from sight. But I'll see them again, when they will have to be picked over before being put in winter quarters.