first fruits of the prairie flowers; on the warmer southern slopes a
few of the splendid bird's-foot violets of the prairie were showing the
azure color which would soon make some of the hillsides as blue as the
sky; and standing higher than the peering grass rose the rough-leafed
stalks of green which would soon show us the yellow puccoons and
sweet-williams and scarlet lilies and shooting stars, and later the
yellow rosin-weeds, Indian dye-flower and goldenrod. The keen northwest
wind swept before it a flock of white clouds; and under the clouds went
their shadows, walking over the lovely hills like dark ships over an
emerald sea.

[5] "Paas-bloeme" one suspects is the Rondout Valley origin of this term
applied to a flower, possibly seen by the author on this occasion for
the first time--the American pasque-flower, the Iowa prairie type of
which is _Anemone patens_: the knightliest little flower of the Iowa
uplands.--G.v.d.M.

The wild-fowl were clamoring north for the summer's campaign of nesting.
Everywhere the sky was harrowed by the wedged wild geese, their voices
as sweet as organ tones; and ducks quacked, whistled and whirred
overhead, a true rain of birds beating up against the wind. Over every
slew, on all sides, thousands of ducks of many kinds, and several sorts
of geese hovered, settled, or burst up in eruptions of birds, their
back-feathers shining like bronze as they turned so as to reflect the
sunlight to my eyes; while so far up that they looked like specks, away
above the wind it seemed, so quietly did they circle and sail, floated
huge flocks of cranes--the sand-hill cranes in their slaty-gray, and the
whooping cranes, white as snow with black heads and feet, each bird with
a ten-foot spread of wing, piping their wild cries which fell down to me
as if from another world.