VI.  AUTUMN TIDES

The season is always a little behind the sun in our climate, just as the tide is always a little behind the moon.  According to the calendar, the summer ought to culminate about the 21st of June, but in reality it is some weeks later; June is a maiden month all through.  It is not high noon in nature till about the first or second week in July.  When the chestnut-tree blooms, the meridian of the year is reached.  By the first of August it is fairly one o’clock.  The lustre of the season begins to dim, the foliage of the trees and woods to tarnish, the plumage of the birds to fade, and their songs to cease.  The hints of approaching fall are on every hand.  How suggestive this thistle-down, for instance, which, as I sit by the open window, comes in and brushes softly across my hand!  The first snowflake tells of winter not more plainly than this driving down heralds the approach of fall.  Come here, my fairy, and tell me whence you come and whither you go?  What brings you to port here, you gossamer ship sailing the great sea?  How exquisitely frail and delicate!  One of the lightest things in nature; so light that in the closed room here it will hardly rest in my open palm.  A feather is a clod beside it.  Only a spider’s web will hold it; coarser objects have no power over it.  Caught in the upper currents of the air and rising above the clouds, it might sail perpetually.  Indeed, one fancies it might almost traverse the interstellar ether and drive against the stars.  And every thistle-head by the roadside holds hundreds of these sky rovers,—­imprisoned Ariels unable to set themselves free.  Their liberation may be by the shock of the wind, or the rude contact of cattle, but it is oftener the work of the goldfinch with its complaining brood.  The seed of the thistle is the proper food of this bird, and in obtaining it myriads of these winged creatures are scattered to the breeze.  Each one is fraught with a seed which it exists to sow, but its wild careering and soaring does not fairly begin till its burden is dropped, and its spheral form is complete.  The seeds of many plants and trees are disseminated through the agency of birds; but the thistle furnishes its own birds,—­flocks of them, with wings more ethereal and tireless than were ever given to mortal creature.  From the pains Nature thus takes to sow the thistle broadcast over the land, it might be expected to be one of the most troublesome and abundant of weeds.  But such is not the case; the more pernicious and baffling weeds, like snapdragon or blind nettles, are more local and restricted in their habits, and unable to fly at all.