It is not good to be of the city folk.  Of this I am convinced.  There is something in the mode of life that breeds an alarming condition of blindness and deafness, or so it seems with the city folk that come to my poppy field.  Of the many to whom I have talked ethically not one has been found who ever saw the warnings so conspicuously displayed, while of those called out to from the porch, possibly one in fifty has heard.  Also, I have discovered that the relation of city folk to country flowers is quite analogous to that of a starving man to food.  No more than the starving man realizes that five pounds of meat is not so good as an ounce, do they realize that five hundred poppies crushed and bunched are less beautiful than two or three in a free cluster, where the green leaves and golden bowls may expand to their full loveliness.

Less forgivable than the unaesthetic are the mercenary.  Hordes of young rascals plunder me and rob the future that they may stand on street corners and retail “California poppies, only five cents a bunch!” In spite of my precautions some of them made a dollar a day out of my field.  One horde do I remember with keen regret.  Reconnoitring for a possible dog, they applied at the kitchen door for “a drink of water, please.”  While they drank they were besought not to pick any flowers.  They nodded, wiped their mouths, and proceeded to take themselves off by the side of the bungalow.  They smote the poppy field beneath my windows, spread out fan-shaped six wide, picking with both hands, and ripped a swath of destruction through the very heart of the field.  No cyclone travelled faster or destroyed more completely.  I shouted after them, but they sped on the wings of the wind, great regal poppies, broken-stalked and mangled, trailing after them or cluttering their wake—­the most high-handed act of piracy, I am confident, ever committed off the high seas.

One day I went a-fishing, and on that day a woman entered the field.  Appeals and remonstrances from the porch having no effect upon her, Bess despatched a little girl to beg of her to pick no more poppies.  The woman calmly went on picking.  Then Bess herself went down through the heat of the day.  But the woman went on picking, and while she picked she discussed property and proprietary rights, denying Bess’s sovereignty until deeds and documents should be produced in proof thereof.  And all the time she went on picking, never once overlooking her hand.  She was a large woman, belligerent of aspect, and Bess was only a woman and not prone to fisticuffs.  So the invader picked until she could pick no more, said “Good-day,” and sailed majestically away.

“People have really grown worse in the last several years, I think,” said Bess to me in a tired sort of voice that night, as we sat in the library after dinner.