Here, cicadas sing their loudest, and the crickets draw the bow,
  And the ’hoppers and the locusts join the chorus, soft and low;
  And you hear the bees a humming like a fiddle with one string,
  While the air just seems to vibrate with a soothing kind of ring.

  There the squirrel scolds and chatters as he runs along the rail,
  And you hear the rain-crow calling, and the whistle of the quail;
  And the catbird, and the blue jay, scold with vigor most intense,
  As they build among the branches by the stake-and-rider fence.

  There grew the tasseled milkweed with its bursting silken pods,
  And the stately, waving branches of the yellow goldenrod;
  The mullein stalk and asters, with teasels growing dense,
  God’s garden, in the angle of the stake-and-rider fence.

  It was homely, but I loved it, and I wouldn’t trade, would you? 
  For all the hothouse beauties that a florist ever knew. 
  Yes, I’d give up earthly honors, and count it recompense,
  Just to wander through the meadow by the stake-and-rider fence.

[Illustration]

Moonlight

The beautiful California days, with warm sunshine tempered by the cool winds from the bay, are not surpassed in any country under the sun.  But if the days are perfect, the brilliant moonlight nights lose nothing by comparison.

To tramp the hills and woods, or climb the rugged mountains by day, is a joy to the nature lover.  But the same trip by moonlight has an interest and charm entirely its own, and mysteries of nature are revealed undreamed of at noonday.

The wind, that has run riot during the day, has blown itself out by evening, and the birds have gone to sleep with heads tucked under their wings, or settled with soft breasts over nestlings that twitter soft “good nights” to mother love.  The dark shadows of evening steal the daylight, and canon and ravine lose their rugged outlines, blending into soft, shadowy browns and purples.  The moon peeps over the hilltop, the stars come out one by one, the day is swallowed up in night, and the moonlight waves its pale wand over the landscape.

In the deep woods it flickers through the branches, mottling the ground with silver patches, and throwing into grand relief the trunks of trees, like sentinels on duty.  It touches the little brook as softly as a baby’s kiss, and transforms it into a sheen of gold.  It drops its yellow light upon a bed of ferns until each separate frond stands out like a willow plume nodding up and down in the mellow gleam.  A flowering dogwood bathed in its ethereal light shimmers like a bridal veil adorning a wood nymph.  It lays its gentle touch on the waterfall, transforming it into a torrent of molten silver, and causing each drop to glisten like topaz under its witching light.

Overhead fleecy clouds, like white-winged argosies, sail high amid the blue, or, finer spun, like a lady’s veil, are drawn, gauzelike, across the sky, through which the stars peep out with twinkling brilliancy.  The scent of new-mown hay laden with falling dew comes floating up from the valley with an intoxicating sweetness, a sweetness to which the far-famed perfume of Arabia is not to be compared.