nother
these days celebrate some trial or triumph, some deep experience of the
soul.

There is Melon Day, for example,--a movable feast-day in August, if
indeed it come so early, when we pick the first watermelon. That, you
ask, a deep emotional experience, an affair of the soul?

This is Massachusetts, dear reader, and I hail from the melon fields of
Jersey. Even there a watermelon, to him who is spiritually minded, who,
walking through a field of the radiant orbs (always buy an elongated
ellipsoid for a real melon), hears them singing as they shine--even to
the Jerseyman, I say, the taste of the season's first melon is of
something out of Eden before the fall. But here in Massachusetts, Ah,
the cold I fight, the drought I fight, the worms I fight, the blight I
fight, the striped bugs I fight, the will-to-die in the very vines
themselves I fight, until at last (once it was the 7th of August!) the
heart inside of one of the green rinds is red with ripeness, and ready to
split at the sight of a knife, answering to the thump with a far-off,
muffled thud,--the family, I say, when that melon is brought in crisp and
cool from the dewy field, is prompt at breakfast, and puts a fervor into
the doxology that morning deeper far than is usual for the mere manna and
quail gathered daily at the grocer's.

We have been (once) to the circus, but that day is not in red. That is
everybody's day, while the red-letter days on our
calendar--Storm-Door-and-Double-Window Day, for instance; or the day
close to Christmas when we begin, "Marley was dead, to begin with"; or
the Day of the First Snow--these days are peculiarly, privately our own,
and these are red.

[Illustration: The Fields of Fodder]

XIV

THE FIELDS OF FODDER

It is doubtless due to early associations, to the large part played by
cornfields in my boyhood, that I cannot come upon one now in these New
England farms without a touch of homesickness. It was always the
autumn more than the spring that appealed to me as a child; and there
was something connected with the husking and the shocking of the corn
that took deeper hold upon my imagination than any other single event
of the farm year, a kind of festive joy, something solemnly beautiful
and significant, that to this day makes a field of corn in the shock
not so much the substance of earth's bounty as the symbol of earth's
life, or rather of life--here on the earth as one could wish it to
be--lived to the