Does he not still live among us?  Does he not question us, teach us?  Yellow loose-strifes and rattle-box are in the swamp, and a patch of swamp milkweed with brilliant fritillaries sipping nectar from its purple blossoms.  White wands of meadow-sweet, clusters of sensitive fern, a big shrub of pussy willow with cool green leaves as grateful now as the white and gold blossoms were in April; white trunks and fluttering leaves of small aspens where the grosbeak has just finished nesting; bushy willows and withes of young poplar; nodding wool-grasses and various headed sedges; all these are between the roadside and the fence.  There the elder puts out blossoms of spicy snow big as dinner-plates and the Maryland yellow-throat who has four babies in the bulky nest at the foot of the black-berry bush sits and sings his “witchity, witchity, witchity.”  The lark sparrow has her nest at the foot of a thistle and her mate has perched so often on a small elm near-by that he has worn several of the leaves from a topmost twig.  In the late afternoons and evenings he sits there and vies with the indigo bunting who sits on the bare branches at the top of a tall red oak, throwing back his little head and pouring out sweet rills of melody.  Near him is the dickcissel, incessantly singing from the twig of a crab-apple; these three make a tireless trio, singing each hour of the day.  The bunting’s nest is in a low elm bush close to the fence where a wee brown bird sits listening to the strains of the bright little bird above and the little dickcissels have just hatched out in the nest at the base of a tussock not very far away.

Now the evening primrose at the side of the road has folded all its yellow petals, marking the near approach of noon.  Growing near it on this rise of the road are lavender-flowered bergamot, blue and gold spiderwort, milkweeds in a purple glory, black-eyed Susans basking in the sun, cone-flowers with brown disks and purple petals, like gypsy maidens with gaudy summer shawls.  Closer to the fence are lemon-yellow coreopsis with quaint, three-cleft leaves; thimble weeds with fruit columns half a finger’s length; orange-flowered milkweed, like the color of an oriole’s back, made doubly gay by brilliant butterflies and beetles.  On the sandy bank which makes the background for this scene of splendor, the New Jersey tea, known better as the red-root, lifts its feathery white plumes above restful, gray-green leaves.  Just at the fence the prairie willow has a beauty all its own, with a wealth of leaves glossy dark green above and woolly white below.

There’s a whine as if someone had suddenly struck a dog and a brownish bird runs crouching through the grass while little gingery-brown bodies scatter quickly for their hiding places.  It was near here that the quail had her nest in June and these are her babies.  I reach down and get one, a little bit of a chick scarcely bigger than the end of my thumb.  The mother circles around, quite near, with alarm and distress until I back away and watch.  Then she comes forward, softly clucking, and soon gathers her chickens under her wings.