In August the pale and delicate poetry of the Kentucky land makes itself felt as silence and repose.  Still skies, still woods, still sheets of forest water, still flocks and herds, long lanes winding without the sound of a traveller through fields of the universal brooding stillness.  The sun no longer blazing, but muffled in a veil of palest blue.  No more black clouds rumbling and rushing up from the horizon, but a single white one brushing slowly against the zenith like the lost wing of a swan.  Far beneath it the silver-breasted hawk, using the cloud as his lordly parasol.  The eagerness of spring gone, now all but incredible as having ever existed; the birds hushed and hiding; the bee, so nimble once, fallen asleep over his own cider-press in the shadow of the golden apple.  From the depths of the woods may come the notes of the cuckoo; but they strike the air more and more slowly, like the clack, clack of a distant wheel that is being stopped at the close of harvest.  The whirring wings of the locust let themselves go in one long wave of sound, passing into silence.  All nature is a vast sacred goblet, filling drop by drop to the brim, and not to be shaken.  But the stalks of the later flowers begin to be stuffed with hurrying bloom lest they be too late; and the nighthawk rapidly mounts his stairway of flight higher and higher, higher and higher, as though he would rise above the warm white sea of atmosphere and breathe in cold ether.

Always in August my nature will go its own way and seek its own peace.  I roam solitary, but never alone, over this rich pastoral land, crossing farm after farm, and keeping as best I can out of sight of the laboring or loitering negroes.  For the sight of them ruins every landscape, and I shall never feel myself free till they are gone.  What if they sing?  The more is the pity that any human being could be happy enough to sing so long as he was a slave in any thought or fibre of his nature.

Sometimes it is through the after-math of fat wheat-fields, where float like myriad little nets of silver gauze the webs of the crafty weavers, and where a whole world of winged small folk flit from tree-top to tree-top of the low weeds.  They are all mine—­these Kentucky wheat-fields.  After the owner has taken from them his last sheaf I come in and gather my harvest also—­one that he did not see, and doubtless would not begrudge me—­the harvest of beauty.  Or I walk beside tufted aromatic hemp-fields, as along the shores of softly foaming emerald seas; or past the rank and file of fields of Indian-corn, which stand like armies that had gotten ready to march, but been kept waiting for further orders, until at last the soldiers had gotten tired, as the gayest will, of their yellow plumes and green ribbons, and let their big hands fall heavily down at their sides.  There the white and the purple morning-glories hang their long festoons and open to the soft midnight winds their elfin trumpets.