I like to be rid of them all, as I am rid of them this midsummer’s day.  I like to steep my soul in a sea of quiet, with nothing floating past me, as I lie moored to my thought, but the perfume of flowers, and soaring birds, and shadows of clouds.

Two days since I was sweltering in the heat of the City, jostled by the thousand eager workers, and panting under the shadow of the walls.  But I have stolen away; and for two hours of healthful regrowth into the darling Past I have been lying this blessed summer’s morning upon the grassy bank of a stream that babbled me to sleep in boyhood.—­Dear old stream, unchanging, unfaltering,—­with no harsher notes now than then,—­never growing old,—­smiling in your silver rustle, and calming yourself in the broad, placid pools,—­I love you as I love a friend!

But now that the sun has grown scalding hot, and the waves of heat have come rocking under the shadow of the meadow-oaks, I have sought shelter in a chamber of the old farm-house.  The window-blinds are closed; but some of them are sadly shattered, and I have intertwined in them a few branches of the late-blossoming white azalia, so that every puff of the summer air comes to me cooled with fragrance.  A dimple or two of the sunlight still steals through my flowery screen, and dances (as the breeze moves the branches) upon the oaken floor of the farm-house.

Through one little gap indeed I can see the broad stretch of meadow, and the workmen in the field bending and swaying to their scythes.  I can see too the glistening of the steel, as they wipe their blades, and can just catch floating on the air the measured, tinkling thwack of the rifle-stroke.

Here and there a lark, scared from his feeding-place in the grass, soars up, bubbling forth his melody in globules of silvery sound, and settles upon some tall tree, and waves his wings, and sinks to the swaying twigs.  I hear too a quail piping from the meadow fence, and another trilling his answering whistle from the hills.  Nearer by, a tyrant king-bird is poised on the topmost branch of a veteran pear-tree, and now and then dashes down, assassin-like, upon some homebound, honey-laden bee, and then with a smack of his bill resumes his predatory watch.

A chicken or two lie in the sun, with a wing and a leg stretched out,—­lazily picking at the gravel, or relieving their ennui from time to time with a spasmodic rustle of their feathers.  An old, matronly hen stalks about the yard with a sedate step, and with quiet self-assurance she utters an occasional series of hoarse and heated clucks.  A speckled turkey, with an astonished brood at her heels, is eying curiously, and with earnest variations of the head, a full-fed cat, that lies curled up, and dozing, upon the floor of the cottage porch.

As I sit thus, watching through the interstices of my leafy screen the various images of country life, I hear distant mutterings from beyond the hills.