At noon, the day being torrid, there was comparative silence, and yet as I looked about me I saw ceaseless activity in a small way. The ants were still journeying, and red admiral and yellow swallow-tailed butterflies came near, and the latter even passed high overhead and mingled with the chimney-swifts. Had I been on the ground, walking instead of waiting, I should have sought some sheltered spot and rested, taking a hint from much of the wild life I was watching. AT NOONTIDE. Where cluster oaks and runs the rapid brook, Repose the jutting rocks beneath the ferns; Here seeks the thrush his hidden leafy nook, And wandering squirrel to his hole returns. Afar the steaming river slowly wends Its tortuous way to mingle with the sea; No cheerful voice its languid course attends; The blight of silence rests upon the lea. Where the wide meadow spreads its wealth of weeds, Where the rank harvest waves above the field, The testy hornet in his anger speeds, And stolid beetle bears his brazen shield. Give them the glowing, fiery world they love, Give me the cool retreat beside the stream; While sweeps the sun the noontide sky above, Here would I linger with the birds and dream. [Illustration: _The Chesapeake Oak_] And now what of the tree itself? Here I have been the better part of a long fore-noon, and scarcely given this fine young oak a thought. A young oak, yet a good deal older than its burden; an oak that was an acorn when the century was new, and now a sturdy growth full sixty feet high, straight of stem to its undermost branches and shapely everywhere. Such trees are not remarkable of themselves, though things of beauty, but at times how suggestive! Think of pre-Columbian America; then there were oaks to make men marvel. “There were giants in those days.” Occasionally we meet with them even now. A year ago I camped on the shore of Chesapeake Bay near an oak that measured eighteen feet six inches in circumference four feet from the ground, and in St. Paul’s church-yard, not a great way off, are five big oaks, one of which is twenty feet around shoulder high from the roots. Such trees are very old. The church-yard was enclosed two centuries ago, and these were big trees then, and so older by far than any monument of white men on the continent, except possible traces of the Norsemen. If a tree such as this in which I have been sitting is full to overflowing with suggestiveness, how much more so a noble patriarch like that upon the bay shore! It is usually not easy to realize the dimensions of a huge tree by merely looking at it, but this mammoth impressed one at first sight. The branches were themselves great trees, and together cast a circular patch of shade, at noon, three paces more than one hundred feet across.