Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. II.djvu/224

Rh covered with its flowers, protected and watched alone by the eye of the sun. And the bright sun-flowers nodded and beckoned in the wind, as if inviting millions of beings to the festival set out on the rich table of the earth. To me it was a festival of light. It was a really great and glorious sight; to my feeling less common and grander even than Niagara itself.

The dark hunter, a man of few words but evidently of strong feelings, leaned upon his gun and said softly, “Here I often stand for hours and gaze on creation!”

And well he might. That sight resembled an extacy in the life of nature. It was bathed in light; it reposed blissfully in the bosom of light. The sunflowers sang praises to the sun.

I wandered about in the wood and gathered flowers. The asters grew above my head. Nearly all the flowers which now cover the prairies are of the class syngenesia, and of these the Solidago and Helianthus predominate. The prairies are covered each different month with a different class of flowers; in spring white, then blue, then purple, and now mostly of a golden yellow.

In the course of the day we visited one of the log-houses on the plain. A nice old woman was at home. The men were out getting in the hay. The house was one year old, and tolerably open to the weather, but clean and orderly within, as are houses generally in which live American women. I asked the good women how the solitude of this great prairie agreed with her. She was tired of it, “It was so monotonous, ” she said. Yes, yes, there is a difference between seeing this sight of heaven and earth for one day and for a whole year! Nevertheless I would try it for a year.

We did not see a cloud during the whole of this day, nor yet perceive a breath of air; yet still the atmosphere was as fresh as it was delicious. The Indian summer will soon begin. The whole of that little prairie-festival was