Nature-notes and impressions : in prose and verse / by Madison Cawein [electronic text]

August 10th. The large golden touch-me-not, blunt-spurred and lemon-yellow, and the tall blue bellflower, bluebell blue, make a wilderness of color on the shady hillside,—changing kaleidoscopic with the seasons,—leading precipitately over rocks and roots to the creek that, swollen clay-red with last night's rain, and haunted of the kingfisher and the small green heron, flows slowly, sluggishly along, heavy with soil, as a life with sins, between its weedy and sycamore banks. There

is a warm, damp, green, forest odor of wet earth and leaves and weeds everywhere, and the path along the stream is lost in the dense, high, succulent stalks of the jewelweed hung with its orange-colored, red-freckled horns, brimming with rain—veritable vats of wild-honey for the bees and butterflies to drown themselves in.

Cleared of woodland, the hot hillside here is covered with the blossoms of the wild-bean; their puckered pink, dotting thickly the thin, pale grass and broom-sedge, gives the hillside the appearance of being spread with an old-fashioned, single-patterned quilt of gigantic proportions.