In the fields the far-flung banners of the corn take on ripening tints and begin to rustle drily in the breeze.  Golden ears, wrapped in tobacco-brown silk, are pushing from tanned and purplish husks.  Newly-plowed fields were made possible by the rains which started the grass growing in the stubble, changing the color from amber to emerald and wrought a miracle of verdure in the pastures which August had baked brown.  Here and there the aftermath of red clover has developed a field of new blossoms,—­a little lake of pink where sunshine plays with shadow and sturdy humble bees spend the days in ecstasy.

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Summer puts on her last bright robes for the final floral review before she is borne by the birds down the valley to set up her court in the southland.  Tall and soldierly, this last gay army of the flowers passes in review before her.  Blazing stars in pink and purple, tall and picturesque, with long rows of brilliant buttons; regiments of asters in blue and white and purple; rattle-snake root with big and quaintly slashed leaves and hundreds of tassels in delicate shades of lilac, purple and white; swamp sunflowers in dazzling yellow, camped in millions along the creek bottom to make it more glorious than the historical pageant of the Field of the Cloth of Gold; plumy battalions of golden-rod, marshalled by the sun along every country lane; companies of tall, saw-leaved sunflowers with golden petals and darker disks, deployed along the fences and seen at their best in the twilight when they look like friendly faces with beaming eyes; as I write them so they march across the land and bow farewell to summer.  There is no floral spectacle in all the land so fine as this march of the composites over the Iowa prairies and fields in September.  That is the judgment of those who have travelled and observed.  In the swamps and along the ditches the blue lobelias flourish and the companies of blue gentians are bringing up the rear to end the floral review, begging the summer to wait until they pass by.

The little creek near which I live rises in a little swale between two rolling ridges of the pasture.  When it leaves the pasture only a narrow box culvert is necessary to take it across the road, but before it reaches the river, twenty miles away, a double-spanned bridge is required to carry the road over it.  In the pasture where it rises it fails to furnish enough water for the cattle, but half way along its course it sometimes washes out bridges in the springtime and farther down it often floods the lowlands.  Slipping silently among the feet of the long grasses in the meadows it is scarcely seen at first; but by-and-by it attains the dignity of a stream, winding through meadows and bordering orchards and grain-fields.  Now the willows begin to mark its course, then elms and oaks and walnuts with little thickets of panicled dogwood and wild plum, where the wild grape and the bittersweet display their fruit and the wild duck sometimes makes her nest.