in the early days, and draws divine
brown Turners of the first manner.

The fields and hedgerows must needs fade, and the sun made the fading
quick with the bloom of brown. For one great meadow so softly gilded, I
would give all the scarlet and yellow trees that ever made a steaming
autumn gorgeous--all the crimson of the Rhine valleys, all the patched
and spotted walnut-leaves of the _muhl-thal_ by Boppard, and the little
trees that change so suddenly to their yellow of decay in groups at the
foot of the ruins of Sternberg and Liebenstein, every one of their
branches disguised in the same bright, insignificant, unhopeful colour.

An autumn so rare should not close without a recorded "hail and
farewell!" Spring was not braver, summer was not sweeter. That year's
great sun called upon a great spirit in all the riverside woods. Those
woods did not grow cold; they yielded to their last sunset.

THE PLAID

It is disconcerting to hear of the plaid in India. Our dyes, we know,
they use in the silk mills of Bombay, with the deplorable result that
their old clothes are dull and unintentionally falsified with
infelicitous decay. The Hindus are a washing people; and the sun and
water that do but dim, soften, and warm the native vegetable dyes to the
last, do but burlesque the aniline. Magenta is bad enough when it is
itself; but the worst of magenta is that it spoils but poorly. No bad
modern forms and no bad modern colours spoil well. And spoiling is an
important process. It is a test--one of the ironical tests that come too
late with their proofs. London portico-houses will make some such ruins
as do chemical dyes, which undergo no use but derides them, no accidents
but caricature them. This is an old enough grievance. But the plaid!

The plaid is the Scotchman's contribution to the decorative art of the
world. Scotland has no other indigenous decoration. In his most
admirable lecture on "The Two Paths," Ruskin acknowledged, with a passing
misgiving, that his Highlanders had little art. And the misgiving was
but passing, because he considered how fatally wrong was the art of
India--"it never represents a natural fact. It forms its compositions
out of meaningless fragments of colour and flowings of line . . . It will
not draw a man, but an eight-armed monster; it will not draw a flower,
but only a spiral or a zig-zag." Because of this aversion from Nature
the Hindu and his art tended to evil, we rea