Under these broad leaves the catbird is concealed.  Elegant epicurean, he is sampling the ripening choke-cherries.  He complains querulously at being disturbed, flirts his tail and flies.  Stout branches of sumac, with bark colored and textured much like brown egg-shell, sustain a canopy of wild grape, the clusters of green fruit only partly hidden by the broad leaves.  Curiously beautiful are the sumac’s leaves, showing long leaf-stalks of pink purple and pretty leaflets strung regularly on either side.  The sumac’s fruit, unlike the grape’s, seeks no concealment; proudly lifting its glowing torches above the leafy canopy, it lights the old road for the passing of the pageant of summer.  From greenish gold to scarlet, swiftly changing to carmine, terra cotta, crimson and garnet, so glows and deepens the color in the torches.  When comes the final garnet glow not even the cold snows of winter can quench it.

[Illustration:  “The sumac’s torches light up the old road” (p. 35)]

Around the fence-post, where the versi-colored fungus grows, the moon-seed winds its stems, like strands of twine.  Its broad leaves are set like tilted mirrors to catch and reflect the light.  Trailing among the grass the pea-vine lifts itself so that its blossoms next month shall attract the bees.  The wild hop is reaching over the bushes for the branches of the low-growing elm from which to hang its fruit clusters.  Circling up the trunk and the spreading branches of the elm, the Virginia creeper likewise strives for better and greater light.  Flower and vine, shrub and tree, each with its own peculiar inherited tendencies resulting from millions of years of development, strives ever for perfection.  Shall man, with the civilization of untold centuries at his back to push him on, do less?  Endowed with mind and heart, with spiritual aspirations and a free will, shall he dare cease to grow?  Equipped so magnificently for the light, dare he deliberately seek the darkness and allow his mental and spiritual fruits to wither?  These are questions to ponder as the afternoon shadows lengthen.

If you walk through the wooded pasture, close by the side of the roadside fence, the hollow stumps hold rain-water, like huge tankards for a feast.  Sometimes a shaft of sunlight shoots into the water, making it glow with color.  Fungi in fantastic shapes are plentiful.  Growing from the side of a stump, the stem of the fawn-colored pluteus bends upwards to the light.  Golden clavarias cover fallen trunks with coral masses and creamy ones are so delicately fragile that you almost fear to touch them lest you mar their beauty.  Brown brackets send out new surfaces of creamy white on which the children may stencil their names.  That vivid yellow on a far stump is the sulphur-colored polyporus.  Green and red Russulas delight the eye.  The lactaria sheds hot, white milk when you cut it, and the inky coprinus sheds black rain of its own accord.  Puff-balls scatter their spores when you smite them and the funnel-shaped clitocybe holds water as a wine-glass holds Sauterne.