dreaming, on trees and cliff and river. On such a night pleading Pan
wooed his coy nymph with the promise:

_And then I'll tell you tales that no one knows
Of what the trees talk in the summer nights;
When far above you hear them murmuring,
As they sway whispering to the lifting breeze._




IX.--THE PASSING OF SUMMER


When the wild plums ripen in the thicket by the creek and the grapes
are purpling in the kisses of the sun; when even the sunlight itself
grows mellow and the landscape wears a dreamy haze, colored like the
bloom on a plum, as if the year, too, had reached perfect ripeness;
then it is mid-September and Iowa begins a season of loveliness which
shall hardly be excelled anywhere on earth.

Young birds imitate the spring songs of their parents in a faint,
wistful, reminiscent way, some of those hatched early in the year
rising almost to full song, as in the case of the meadow larks whose
music rings through the meadows and makes the balmy afternoons seem
like those of early May. The wild strawberry blossoms again; the
violet and some of the other spring flowers. But the signs of the
passing of the summer are everywhere in evidence. Dense, white morning
mists--the September mists--lie in the valleys and yield but slowly
to the shafts of the rising sun. Flocks of feathered voyagers are