There
were thistles, the big, rank, richly growing, kind, that browsing
cattle and sheep circled widely.
Very beautiful were these frosted thistles, with their large,
widespreading base leaves, each spine needle-tipped, their uplifted
heads of delicate purple bloom, and their floating globes of silken
down, with a seed in their hearts. No wonder artists have painted
them, decorators conventionalized them; even potters could not pass
by their artistic merit, for I remembered that in a china closet at
home there were Belleck cups moulded in the shape of a thistle head.
Experience had taught me how the appreciate this plant. There
wasa chewink in the Stanley woods, that brought off a brood of four,
under the safe shelter of a rank thistle leaf, in the midst of
trampling herds of cattle driven wild by flies. There was a ground
sparrow near the Hale sand pit, covered by a base leaf of another
thistle, and beneath a third on Bob's lease, I had made a study of
an exquisite nest. Protection from the rank leaves was not all the
birds sought of these plants, for goldfinches were darting around
inviting all creation to "See me?" as they gathered the silken
down for nest lining.
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