or sent through the whirling thresher. The barley and the rye are
garnered and gone, the landscape has many bare and open spaces. But
separating these everywhere, rise the fields of Indian corn now in
blade and tassel; and--more valuable than all else that has been
sown and harvested or remains to be--everywhere the impenetrable
thickets of the hemp.

Impenetrable! For close together stand the stalks, making common
cause for soil and light, each but one of many, the fibre being
better when so grown--as is also the fibre of men. Impenetrable
and therefore weedless; for no plant life can flourish there, nor
animal nor bird. Scarce a beetle runs bewilderingly through those
forbidding colossal solitudes. The field-sparrow will flutter away
from pollen-bearing to pollen-receiving top, trying to beguile you
from its nest hidden near the edge. The crow and the blackbird will
seem to love it, having a keen eye for the cutworm, its only enemy.
The quail does love it, not for itself, but for its protection,
leading her brood into its labyrinths out of the dusty road when
danger draws near. Best of all winged creatures it is loved by the
iris-eyed, burnish-breasted, murmuring doves, already beginning to
gather in the deadened tree-tops with crops eager for the seed.
Well remembered also by the long-flight passenger pigeon, coming
into the land for the mast. Best of all wild things whose safety
lies not in the wing but in the foot, it is loved by the hare for
its young, for refuge. Those lithe, velvety, summer-thin bodies!
Observe carefully the tops of the still hemp: are they slightly
shaken? Among the bases of those stalks a cotton-tail is threading
its way inward beyond reach of its pursuer. Are they shaken
violently, parted clean and wide to right and left? It is the path
of the dog following the hot scent--ever baffled.