All that June which followed, I passed my leisure hours and leisure days in the open air, in the woods. I chased the sunshine from the fields in under the deep trees, where it only flickered through the leaves. I hunted for flowers, too, beginning with the gay ones which shone with color. I wondered how it was they could drink in so much of the sun's glow. Then I fell to studying all the science of color and all the theories which are woven about it. I plunged into books of chemistry, to try to find out how it was that certain flowers should choose certain colors out from the full beam of light. After the long days, I sat late into the night, studying all that books could tell me. I collected prisms, and tried, in scattering the rays, to learn the properties of each several pencil of light. I grew very wise and learned, but never came nearer the secret I was searching for,--why it was that the Violet, lying so near the Dandelion, should choose and find such a different dress to wear. It was not the rarer flowers that I brought home, at first. My hands were filled with Dandelions and Buttercups. The Saint-John's-Wort delighted me, and even the gaudy Sunflower. I trained the vines which had been drooping round our old house,--the gray time-worn house; the "natural-colored house," the neighbors called it. I thought of the blind boy who fancied the sound of the trumpet must be scarlet, as I trained up the brilliant scarlet trumpet-flower which my sister had planted long ago. So the summer passed away. My companions and neighbors did not wonder much, that, after studying so many books, I should begin to study flowers and botany. And November came. My occupation was not yet taken away, for Golden-Rod and the Asters gleamed along the dusty roadside, and still underneath the Maples there lay a sunny glow from the yellow leaves not yet withered beneath them. One day I received a summons from our overseer, Mr. Clarkson, to visit him in the evening. I went, a little disturbed, lest he might have some complaint to make of the engrossing nature of my present occupations. This I was almost led to believe, from the way in which he began to speak to me. His perorations, to be sure, were apt to be far wide of his subject; and this time, as usual, I could allow him two or three minutes' talk before it became necessary for me to give him my attention.