the hemp. With that in view, all other shades in nature seem dead
and count for nothing. Far reflected, conspicuous, brilliant,
strange; masses of living emerald, saturated with blazing sunlight.

Darker, always darker turns the hemp as it rushes upward: scarce
darker as to the stemless stalks which are hidden now; but darker
in the tops. Yet here two shades of greenness: the male plants
paler, smaller, maturing earlier, dying first; the females darker,
taller, living longer, more luxuriant of foliage and flowering
heads.

A hundred days from the sowing, and those flowering heads have come
forth with their mass of leaves and bloom and earliest fruits,
elastic, swaying six, ten, twelve feet from the ground and ripe for
cutting. A hundred days reckoning from the last of March or the
last of April, so that it is July, it is August. And now, borne far
through the steaming air floats an odor, balsamic, startling: the
odor of those plumes and stalks and blossoms from which is exuding
freely the narcotic resin of the great nettle. The nostril expands
quickly, the lungs swell out deeply to draw it in: fragrance once
known in childhood, ever in the memory afterward and able to bring
back to the wanderer homesick thoughts of midsummer days in the
shadowy, many-toned woods, over into which is blown the smell of
the hemp-fields.

Who apparently could number the acres of these in the days gone by?
A land of hemp, ready for the cutting! The oats heavy-headed,
rustling, have turned to gold and been stacked in the stubble or
stored in the lofts of white, bursting barns. The heavy-headed,
rustling wheat has turned to gold and been stacked in the stubble