All that June which followed, I passed my leisure hours and leisure days
in the open air, in the woods. I chased the sunshine from the fields in
under the deep trees, where it only flickered through the leaves. I
hunted for flowers, too, beginning with the gay ones which shone with
color. I wondered how it was they could drink in so much of the sun's
glow. Then I fell to studying all the science of color and all the
theories which are woven about it. I plunged into books of chemistry,
to try to find out how it was that certain flowers should choose certain
colors out from the full beam of light. After the long days, I sat late
into the night, studying all that books could tell me. I collected
prisms, and tried, in scattering the rays, to learn the properties of
each several pencil of light. I grew very wise and learned, but never
came nearer the secret I was searching for,--why it was that the Violet,
lying so near the Dandelion, should choose and find such a different
dress to wear. It was not the rarer flowers that I brought home, at
first. My hands were filled with Dandelions and Buttercups. The
Saint-John's-Wort delighted me, and even the gaudy Sunflower. I trained
the vines which had been drooping round our old house,--the gray
time-worn house; the "natural-colored house," the neighbors called it. I
thought of the blind boy who fancied the sound of the trumpet must be
scarlet, as I trained up the brilliant scarlet trumpet-flower which my
sister had planted long ago.

So the summer passed away. My companions and neighbors did not wonder
much, that, after studying so many books, I should begin to study
flowers and botany. And November came. My occupation was not yet taken
away, for Golden-Rod and the Asters gleamed along the dusty roadside,
and still underneath the Maples there lay a sunny glow from the yellow
leaves not yet withered beneath them.