shady woods where no frost has yet
penetrated, spots like that in which the coral-root is sheltered
and befriended that nevertheless you read the open tale of what is
to come. In low-lying open meadows the frost has spoken. In these
on one night the chill of frozen space weighed down and turned the
dew to ice and wrecked some tender herbage, leaving it brown as if
touched by fire instead of frost. But it is only here and there in
places peculiarly subject to this warning that this has happened.
In shielding forest depths the coverlets of multiple green leaves
have kept the tender things of the wood wrapped warm through the
nights and the frost has said no word. Yet there too the message
has penetrated, by what means I cannot say. The ferns have heard
it and have turned pale. The tender, slender fronds of the
hay-scented Dicksonia are very wan and the odor from them now as you
tramp through is not so much that of new-mown hay, as it was in
June, but rather that of the stack or the mow, always with their
own inimitable woodsy flavor added. The brake whose woody stems
have held its ternate, palm-like fronds bravely aloft all summer
is now a sallow yellow, and the lovely Osmundas and stately
Struthiopteris are bowing their heads in brown acquiescence with
the inevitable. I doubt if it is a message from the air. It is
rather a command from the nerve centres at the base of the stalk,
a message from the brain of the heart-roots that gives the fronds
warning that their day is over. If it were in the air the
polypodys, the Christmas ferns and the spinulose wood ferns would
have lost their color also. It is different with these. There is a
hardier quality in their nature and they seem to revel in the
killing frosts of late autumn and the ice and snow of winter; I
find them as green and as hearty in December as I do now.

Next to the tender ferns it is the woody undergrowth that
recognizes the season first. Long ago some limb of a red maple
growing in the shade has been seen to flare up with a sudden flame
while else all the wood was green. But this in itself is no sign.
This happens here and there in low ground even in very early
summer. Now, however, it is not only here and there but everywhere
that you will find this occasional limb adding scarlet beauty to
the sombre shade of the deep wood, and as your glance passes from
the cool pale ferns to this it slips on and finds color growing on
many things in the woodland shadow. H