horizon with reverberations that
shook the earth; and the rain was whirled across the landscape in long,
white, wavering sheets. Then all day quiet and silence throughout Nature
except for the drops, tapping high and low the twinkling leaves; except
for the new melody of woodland and meadow brooks, late silvery and with
a voice only for their pebbles and moss and mint, but now yellow and
brawling and leaping-back into the grassy channels that were their
old-time beds; except for the indoor music of dripping eaves and rushing
gutters and overflowing rain-barrels. And when at last in the gold of
the cool west the sun broke from the edge of the gray, over what a
green, soaked, fragrant world he reared the arch of Nature's peace!

[Illustration: A COURTSHIP.
Photogravure from Painting by H. Vogka.]

Not a little blade of corn in the fields but holds in an emerald vase
its treasures of white gems. The hemp-stalks bend so low under the
weight of their plumes, that were a vesper sparrow to alight on one for
his evening hymn, it would go with him to the ground. The leaning barley
and rye and wheat flash in the last rays their jeweled beards. Under the
old apple-trees, golden-brown mushrooms are already pushing upward
through the leaf-loam, rank with many an autumn's dropping. About the
yards the peonies fall with faces earthward. In the stable-lots the
larded porkers, with bristles as clean as frost, and flesh of pinky
whiteness, are hunting with nervous nostrils for the lush purslain. The
fowls are driving their bills up and down their wet breasts. And the
farmers who have been shelling corn for the mill come out of their
barns, with their coats over their shoulders, on the way to supper, look
about for the plough-horses, and glance at the western sky, from which
the last drops are falling.

But soon only a more passionate heat shoots from the sun into the
planet. The plumes of the hemp are so dry again, that by the pollen
shaken from their tops you can trace the young rabbits making their way
out to the dusty paths. The shadows of white clouds sail over purple
stretches of blue-grass, hiding the sun from the steady eye of the
turkey, whose brood is spread out before her like a fan on the earth. At
early morning the neighing of the stallions is heard around the horizon;
at noon the bull makes the deep, hot pastures echo with his majestic
summons; out in the blazing meadows the butterflies strike the afternoon
air with more