Evening Republican, Volume 17, Number 297, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 13 December 1913 — The Light of Day. [ARTICLE]

The Light of Day.

Did you never, in walking in the fields, come across a large flat stone, which had lain, nobody knows how long, just where you found it with the grass forming a little hedge, as it were, all round it, close to its edges? And have you not, In obedience to a kind of feeling that told you it had been lying there long enough, insinuated your stick or your foot or your fingers under its edges and turned it over as a housewife turns a cake when she says to herself, "It’s done brown enough by this tkne”? What an odd revelation and what an unforeseen and unpleasant surprise to a small community, the very existence of which you have not suspected until the sudden dismay and scattering among its members produced by your turning the old stone over!

Blades of grass flattened down colorless, matted together, as if they had been bleached or ironed; hideous crawling creatures, some of them coleopeterous or horny < shelled —turtle bugs one wants to call them; some of them softer, but cunningly spread out and compressed like Lepine watches (nature never loses g crack or a crevice, mind you, or a joint in a tavern bedstead, but she always has one of her flat-pattern five timekeepers to slide into it); black, glossy crickets, with their long filaments sticking out like the whips of fourhorse stagecoaches; motionless, sluglike creatures —larvae, perhaps—more horrible in their pulpy stillness than even in the infernal wriggle of maturity! But no sooner Is the stone turned and the wholesome light of day let upon this compressed and blinded community of creeping things than all of them that enjoy the luxury of legs—end some Of them have a good many—rush round wildly, butting each other and everything in this way, and end in a general stampede for underground retreats from the region poisoned by sunshine. Next year you will find the grass growing tall* and green where the stone lay; the ground-bird builds her nest where the beetle had his hole; the dandelion and the buttercup are growing there, and the broad fans o’ insect-angels open and shut’over their golden disks, as the rhythmic >aves of blissful consciousness pulsate through their glorified being.—Holmes