_Literary Monthly_, 1885.
A SUMMER AFTERNOON
HENRY D. WILD '88
In the country, with a soft, calm, hazy afternoon to keep you company!
To feel that Nature and yourself have moods in common, for you are
lazy and Nature is lazy, too, and blinks sleepily at you from filmy,
dreamy eyes that open and shut with your own in a sort of drowsy
rhythm. What more delightful than to yield yourself entirely to the
present mood and wander off somewhere, aimless except to see and feel?
The trim soberness of the dusty road with its gray windings and vistas
of sand-ruts becomes less matter-of-fact at length, and so you leave
it to itself, and seek a path that leads to the heart of Nature and
far from ways of men. Down grassy slopes and over little hillocks that
pique your curiosity by shutting out the view of what is coming next;
now skirting the edge of a furrowed potato-patch, and now sauntering
down cool lanes of corn, listening to the breezy lisping of the long,
green leaves that flap you softly in the face; now across a moist spot
where a spring bubbles forth, apparently only to nourish a family of
cowslips, and so on and on until you break the stillness of a shady
wood as your feet keep alternate time among the heaps of leaves whose
rustling is varied by the occasional noise of crackling twigs.
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