nd fig and pomegranate and quaint odor of olive, scents
that have ripened long in the purple dusk of paradise, the east
wind caught in his garments and bore back to the cold forests of
Northern Germany that night that the prince rode with him. Nor has
he since lost them altogether in crossing the storm-tossed
Atlantic to our shores. Instead the rich vigor of the brine
subtends them and bears them, tanged with salt, to our deeper
delectation. In long carriage they have lost potency, one needs
keen scent to find them, but all the subtle essence of dreams is
in them still, and as the rain brings down early twilight you know
that the prince saw true.

So likely is this storm to come to us in mid-August that the Old
Farmer's Almanack, less oracularly and more bluntly by far than in
its usual weather predictions, bids us look for it each year. Not
only does its yearly recurrence make it a landmark of the passing
of seasons, but the cold northwest breeze which almost invariably
follows it, sucked in from Saskatchewan, breathing of snow
flurries on the frost-touched tundra of the Arctic barrens,
carries a threat of winter that all the world knows. The summer is
over, it says to outdoor creatures, and it is time to put in fall
stores. It is time to hurry all plans that need warm weather for
their completion. Particularly do the late summer and early autumn
blooming plants heed this. Monday saw my favorite meadow dallying
still with the languor of midsummer. Even the tender pink orchid
blooms of arethusa lingered among the grasses, in shadowy,
cool-rooted spots, though the arethusa begins to bloom there in late
May. Hardly have hardhack and meadow-sweet, which are mid-summer
plants, reached the fullness of mature bloom, so softly does the
spring linger in this sheltered spot, so gently does the summer
press her fervor on spring-watered sphagnum.

Crowding up among these have come green sprigs from perennial
roots which are to bear on their tops yellow heads of goldenrod
and loose panicles of purple asters. Yet on the day before the
rain hardly had the green of the goldenrod tips become sun-glinted
with yellow, scarcely an aster had lifted long lashes far enough
so that you could see the iris beneath. After the rain the heads
which had drooped so low in reverence before it rose in the clear
sun and the whole meadow was cloth of gold where before it, had
been olive green with ripe grass tips, while all among the gold
the blue a