the filling of the buds which already have formed for next year. Pull
down a twig of the white-oak and you find a cluster of terminal buds
at the end, marking the close of this year's growth, each of them
containing the nucleus of next year's life. In the axils of the leaves
on the elm are the little jeweled buds which will be brown and dull
all winter, but will shine like garnets when the springtime comes. The
fat, green buds on the linden are yellowing now, and next they are to
be tinted into the ruby red which is so attractive in the winter
months when contrasted with the snow.

As the sun nears the zenith the heat waves on the ridges, and across
the cornfields seem to have a rhythmic motion, as if they are
manifestations of the great throbbing pulse-beat of nature, working at
almost feverish haste to ripen her fruits and prepare for the winter
in the few weeks of summer that yet remain. And now the sunshine has a
new and deeper meaning. If we have ever complained of it, we hasten to
pray pardon. Not only in the cornfields, where the milky ears are fast
filling, but all over upland and lowland, in woods and fields and
meadows, Nature is busy making and storing starch and sugar, protein
and albumen, that the earth and all that therein is may have cause to
rejoice in the fullness of the year. Above the ground she stores it in
drupe and pome and berry, nut and nutlet and achene, and below the
ground in rootstock and rhizome, corm and tuber, pumping them full
with strokes quick and strong in these grand climacteric days of the
summer. All the water which seemed so useless in April, all the rain
which seemed so superfluous and so dreary in May and June, has been
used. Not a drop of it was wasted. Its office was to feed life, to
dissolve the substances in the rocks and the soils which the plants
needed, to be mixed with the sunshine in the manufacture of food for
the present and for the future. Nor is the heat nor the light wasted.