LADIES-IN-WAITING
The soil of this particular region must have been especially greedy for, and adapted to, this obnoxious grass-killer, for it flourished as in no other part of the county; flourishes yet, indeed—though, if one can forget that its presence means poor feed for cattle where might be a crop of juicy hay, the blossoming fields of the old Dalton Settlement look, in early June, the loveliest, most ethereal, in New England. There, a million million feathery daisies sway and dance in the breeze, lifting their snowy wheels to the blue June sky. There they grow and thrive, the slender green stalks tossing their pearly disks among sister groves of buttercups till the eye is fairly dazzled with the symphony of white and gold. The back-aching farmers of the original Dalton Settlement had indeed tried to root out the lovely pests, but little did our Caleb care! If he had ever trod his ancestral acres either for pleasure or profit he might in time have “stomped out” the whiteweed, so the neighbors said, for he had the family foot, the size of an anvil; but
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