ell with the first frost has hardly been broken. The
blackened grass, the blasted vine, have not grown green again. No new
buds are swelling, as after a late frost in spring. Instead, the old
leaves on the limbs rattle and waver down; the cornfield is only an
area of stubs and long lines of yellow shocks; and in the corners of
the meadow fence stand clumps of flower-stalks,--joe-pye-weed, boneset,
goldenrod,--bare and already bleaching; and deep within their matted
shade, where the brook bends about an elder bush, a single amber
pendant of the jewel-weed, to which a bumble-bee comes droning on wings
so loud that a little hyla near us stops his pipe to listen!

There are other sounds, now that the shrill cry of the hyla is
stilled--the cawing of crows beyond the wood, the scratching of a
beetle in the crisp leaves, the cheep of a prying chickadee, the tiny
chirrup of a cricket in the grass--remnants of sounds from the summer,
and echoes as of single strings left vibrating after the concert is
over and the empty hall is closed.

But how sweet is the silence! To be so far removed from sounds that
one can hear a single cricket and the creeping of a beetle in the
leaves! Life allows so little margin of silence nowadays. One cannot
sit down in quiet and listen to the small voices; one is obliged to
stand up--in a telephone booth, a pitiful, two-by-two oasis of silence
in life's desert of confusion and din. If October brought one nothing
else but this sweet refuge from noises it would be enough. For the
silence of October, with its peculiar qualities, is pure balm. There
is none of the oppressive stillness that precedes a severe storm, none
of the ominous hush that falls before the first frost, none of the
death-like lack of sound in a bleak snow-buried swamp or pasture, none
of the awesome majesty of quiet in the movement of the midnight stars,
none of the fearful dumbness of the desert, that muteness without bound
or break, eternal--none of these qualities in the sweet silence of
October. I have listened to all of these, and found them answering to
mute tongues within my own soul, deep unto deep; but such moods are
rare--moods that can meet death, that can sweep through the heavens
with the constellations, and that can hold converse with the dumb,
stirless desert; whereas the need for the healing and restoration found
in the serene silence of October is frequent.

There are voices here, however, many of them; but