Page:Letters from an Oregon Ranch.djvu/190

 just lifted above the green, fully inflated and tugging at their guy-ropes.

The thistle family also is well represented here. Purple with bloom and white with down, the yard looks like a cotton-field. I find the thistle rather interesting, now that I have left the vain world and its distractions and have time to look at it, with its long narrow leaf deeply notched and lance-tipped, its purple-stained paintbrush blossom, its seed-pod,—such a pretty flaring cup of wood-brown, thickly studded with sharp spikes and filled with tiny brown seeds all feathered and ready for flight. It seems a wonderful plant, and must be possessed of virtues still unknown to us, else why did nature take such pains to protect and perpetuate it?

Holding up the brown cup, I blew gently across it, and oh, such a frenzy of excitement among those little feathery folk of thistle-down! They leaped over the housetop, tumbled down the spiked walls, clinging frantically to one another in that brief moment of parting; then, disentangling themselves, floated upward, circling about an instant, took one last look at the little brown home, and one by one sailed away into the blue briery world. As the empty cup fell from my hand, I felt half sorry for those drifting airy voyagers.

When the cups have emptied their contents, they soon become round platters, each with a fringed lining of old-ivory satin, in the centre a tiny tufted couch of softest down. In such a cosey bed had nestled the