frame yield to and sympathize with the seasons? Are
there not more births in the spring and more deaths in the fall? In
the spring one vegetates; his thoughts turn to sap; another kind of
activity seizes him; he makes new wood which does not harden till past
midsummer. For my part, I find all literary work irksome from April to
August; my sympathies run in other channels; the grass grows where
meditation walked. As fall approaches, the currents mount to the head
again. But my thoughts do not ripen well till after there has been a
frost. The burrs will not open much before that. A man's thinking, I
take it, is a kind of combustion, as is the ripening of fruits and
leaves, and he wants plenty of oxygen in the air.

Then the earth seems to have become a positive magnet in the fall; the
forge and anvil of the sun have had their effect. In the spring it is
negative to all intellectual conditions, and drains one of his
lightning.

To-day, October 21st, I found the air in the bushy fields and lanes
under the woods loaded with the perfume of the witch-hazel,--a
sweetish, sickening odor. With the blooming of this bush, Nature says,
"Positively the last." It is a kind of birth in death, of spring in
fall, that impresses one as a little uncanny. All trees and shrubs
form their flower-buds in the fall, and keep the secret till spring.
How comes the witch-hazel to be the one exception, and to celebrate
its floral nuptials on the funeral day of its foliage? No doubt it
will be found that the spirit of some lovelorn squaw has passed into
this bush, and that this is why it blooms in the Indian summer rather
than in the white man's spring.

But it makes the floral series of the woods complete. Between it and
the shad-blow of earliest spring lies the mountain of bloom; the
latter at the base on one side, this at the base on the other, with
the chestnut blossoms at the top in midsummer.

A peculiar feature of our fall may sometimes be seen of a clear
afternoon late in the season. Looking athwart the fields under the
sinking sun, the ground appears covered with a shining veil of
gossamer. A fairy net, invisible at midday and which the position of
the sun now reveals, rests upon the stubble and upon the spears of
grass covering acres in extent,--the work of innumerable little
spiders. The cattle walk through it, but do not seem to break it.
Perhaps a fly would make his mark upon it. At the same time,
stretching from the tops of the tre