The road rises and falls in gentle grades, with alternating banks and
swales. At one high point there is a view down the long avenue of
trees across the open valley beyond, where the city lies snugly, and
then upward to the timber on the far heights across the river where
the hills are always softly blue, no matter what the season of the
year. Sometimes the old road sweeps around fine old trees in
unmathematical curves which add much to its wild beauty. The first man
who drove along it, a hundred years or more ago, followed a cow-path
and the road hasn't changed much since, though the fences which were
later threaded through the shrubs and trees on either side, run
straighter. Never was summer day long enough for me to see and to
study all that the old road had to show. Here, at the moist edge of
the road, the ditch stone-crop is opening its yellow-green flowers,
each one a study in perfect symmetry. With the showy, straw-colored
cyperus it flourishes under the friendly shade of the overhanging
cord-grasses whose flowering stalks already have shot up beyond the
reach of a man. Among them grows the tall blue vervain, its tapering
fingers adorned with circles of blue flowers, like sapphire rings
passing from the base to the tips of the fingers.
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