afternoon? I am wandering alone through the garden, bright with its late July pomp of geraniums and verbenas, and across the orchard, into the wide hot fields. There is no shade anywhere, but, my big sun-bonnet is tipped over my nose, so I may defy sunstroke; and in "my mind's hi," as I once heard a man, of more worth than letters, remark, I see a cool, shady, green little chamber, of which the ceiling is woven branches, and the carpet of mossy grass, while the walls are made of the sturdy brown bodies of the oak and the beech. It is not far away, but it is shut in so deftly that a stranger might pass it by close, and never see it though he went through the field of rye that stretches out to its left in a whitely ruffled sea of light. "After all," I say to myself, as I turn out of the last big field into a cool, shady alley through which a brook runs, "what does it matter if the governor is troublesome? He can't take away any of God's gifts from us; and all the tempers and hard words in creation could not take the glow out of this summer afternoon, or the colour out of the sky, no, never!"
Thus moralizing, I sit down by the brook to rest for a moment before sallying forth into the sun-flooded fields of grain; and it seems to answer "Never!" as it hurries along over the clear stones, not knowing when it is well off, sighing to lose itself in the wide river. Its babble sounds very pretty, as though it were talking to the fragrant meadowsweet that borders its banks like foam, or the yellow milfoil that Jack and I call ladies'-slippers—a frivolous substitute for the grand old name of lotus, of which there are three species, and this common unbeautiful yellow is one. Lotus! what an exquisite name it is! and what exquisite visions it brings up before us! The river is a rare sun-worshipper: almost all his flowers are either yellow or gold-coloured: look at those brazen marigolds yonder, and those handsome irises a yard away: and farther down, where he deepens into a mimic lake, lie more yellow
