Tall amber sheaves, in rustling rows, Are nodded there to greet you, I know that you are out for play—— How I should like to meet you! Though blithe of voice, so shy you are, In this delightful weather; What splendid playmates, you and I, Bob White, would make together.
There, you are gone! but far away I hear your whistle falling, Ah! maybe it is hide and seek, And that’s why you are calling. Along those hazy uplands wide We’d be such merry rangers; What! silent now and hidden, too? Bob White, don’t let’s be strangers.
Perhaps you teach your brood the game, In yonder rainbowed thicket, While winds are playing with the leaves, And softly creaks the cricket. “Bob White! Bob White!” again I hear That blithely whistled chorus, Why should we not companions be? One Father watches o’er us! George Cooper.
THE LITTLE PUMPKIN
Emma Florence Bush.
Once there was a little pumpkin that grew on a vine in a field. All day long the sun shone on him, and the wind blew gently around him. Sometimes the welcome rain fell softly upon him, and as the vine sent her roots deep down into the earth and drew the good sustenance from it, and it flowed through her veins, the little pumpkin drank greedily of the good juice, and grew bigger and bigger, and rounder and rounder, and firmer and firmer.
By and by he grew so big he understood all that the growing things around him were saying, and he listened eagerly.
“I came from the seed of a Jack-o’-lantern,” said this vine to a neighbour, “therefore I must grow all Jack-o’-lanterns.”