move
the wagon-beds or slides, gathering the bundles and carrying them to
where, huge, flat, and round, the stacks begin to rise. At last these
are well built; the gates of the field are closed or the bars put up;
wagons and laborers are gone; the brown fields stand deserted.

One day something is gone from earth and sky: Autumn has come, season
of scales and balances, when the Earth, brought to judgment for its
fruits, says, "I have done what I could--now let me rest!"

Fall!--and everywhere the sights and sounds of falling. In the woods,
through the cool silvery air, the leaves, so indispensable once, so
useless now. Bright day after bright day, dripping night after dripping
night, the never-ending filtering or gusty fall of leaves. The fall of
walnuts, dropping from bare boughs with muffled boom into the deep
grass. The fall of the hickory-nut, rattling noisily down through the
scaly limbs and scattering its hulls among the stones of the brook
below.

The fall of buckeyes, rolling like balls of mahogany into the little
dust paths made by sheep in the hot months when they had sought those
roofs of leaves. The fall of acorns, leaping out of their matted, green
cups as they strike the rooty earth. The fall of red haw, persimmon,
and pawpaw, and the odorous wild plum in its valley thickets. The fall
of all seeds whatsoever of the forest, now made ripe in their high
places and sent back to the ground, there to be folded in against the
time when they shall arise again as the living generations; the homing,
downward flight of the seeds in the many-colored woods all over the
quiet land.

In the fields, too, the sights and sounds of falling, the fall of the
standing fatness. The silent fall of the tobacco, to be hung head
downward in fragrant sheds and barns. The felling whack of the
corn-knife and the rustling of the blades, as the workman gathers
within his arm the top-heavy stalks and presses them into the bulging
shock. The fall of pumpkins into the slow-drawn wagons, the shaded side
of them still white with the morning rime. In the orchards, the fall of
apples shaken thunderously down, and the piling of these in sprawling
heaps near the cider mills. In the vineyards the fall of sugaring
grapes into the baskets and the bearing of them to the winepress in the
cool sunshine, where there is the late droning of bees about the sweet
pomace.

But of all that the earth has yielded with or without the farmer's
help, of al