with lichens, in every shade of grey and green.  Its corners are filled with wild flowers, ferns, gooseberries, raspberries, black and red haw, papaw, wild grapevines, and trees of all varieties.  Across the fence a sumac covered embankment falls precipitately to the Wabash, where it sweeps around a great curve at Horseshoe Bend.  The bed is stone and gravel, the water flows shallow and pure in the sunlight, and mallows and willows fringe the banks.

Beside this stretch of river most of one summer was spent, because there were two broods of cardinals, whose acquaintance I was cultivating, raised in those sumacs.  The place was very secluded, as the water was not deep enough for fishing or swimming.  On days when the cardinals were contrary, or to do the birds justice, when they had experiences with an owl the previous night, or with a hawk in the morning, and were restless or unduly excited, much grist for my camera could be found on the river banks.

These were the most beautiful anywhere in my locality.  The hum of busy life was incessant.  From the top twig of the giant sycamore in Rainbow Bottom, the father of the cardinal flock hourly challenged all creation to contest his right to one particular sumac.  The cardinals were the attraction there; across the fence where the hill sloped the length of the pasture to the lane, lures were many and imperative.  Despite a few large trees, compelling right to life by their majesty, that hillside was open pasture, where the sunshine streamed all day long.  Wild roses clambered over stumps of fallen monarchs, and scrub oak sheltered resting sheep.  As it swept to the crest, the hillside was thickly dotted with mullein, its pale yellow-green leaves spreading over the grass, and its spiral of canary-coloured bloom stiffly upstanding.  There were thistles, the big, rank, richly growing, kind, that browsing cattle and sheep circled widely.

Very beautiful were these frosted thistles, with their large, widespreading base leaves, each spine needle-tipped, their uplifted heads of delicate purple bloom, and their floating globes of silken down, with a seed in their hearts.  No wonder artists have painted them, decorators conventionalized them; even potters could not pass by their artistic merit, for I remembered that in a china closet at home there were Belleck cups moulded in the shape of a thistle head.

Experience had taught me how the appreciate this plant.  There wasa chewink in the Stanley woods, that brought off a brood of four, under the safe shelter of a rank thistle leaf, in the midst of trampling herds of cattle driven wild by flies.  There was a ground sparrow near the Hale sand pit, covered by a base leaf of another thistle, and beneath a third on Bob’s lease, I had made a study of an exquisite nest.  Protection from the rank leaves was not all the birds sought of these plants, for goldfinches were darting around inviting all creation to “See me?” as they gathered the silken down for nest lining.  Over the sweetly perfumed purple heads, the humming-birds held high carnival on Sunshine Hillside all the day.  The honey and bumble bees fled at the birds’ approach, but what were these others, numerous everywhere, that clung to the blooms, greedily thrusting their red noses between the petals, and giving place to nothing else?