UNDER THE GRASSES.
What do you hide, O grasses! say,
Among your tangles green and high?
"Warm-hearted violets for May,
And rocking daisies for July."
What burden do you keep beneath
Your knotted green, that none may see?
"The prophecy of life and death,
A hint, a touch, a mystery."
What hope and passion should I find
If I should pierce your meshes through?
"A clover blossoming in the wind,
A wandering harebell budded blue."
Dora Read Goodale.
"KITTY."
The Idler was hopelessly becalmed off Thomas's Point. Not a ripple could be seen down the Chesapeake, and the locusts and pines along the shore were shuddering uncomfortably with the heat of a July afternoon, hidden halfway to their tops in the summer haze. What was to be done? Five miles from home in a large sloop yacht filled with strangers from the North, the crew left behind to be out of the way, and every one thoroughly convinced that his neighbor was horribly bored!
Thornton gave the tiller a vicious shove, as if that would wake the yacht up, and glared forward along the row of parasols protecting fair faces from the sun and of hats cocked over noses that were screwed up with feelings too deep for words, and more intense than those produced by heat, he thought. By five o'clock we had sung every song that ever was written, and flirtations were becoming desperate. Mollie Brogden, comfortably lodged against the mast, was dropping her blue parasol lower and lower over one of the New York men as their conversation grew more and more intense with the heat, and Mrs. Brogden was becoming really alarmed.