all subdued, single,
pure, as when the chorus stops, and some rare singer carries the air
on, and up, and far away till it is only soul.

The joyous confusion and happy tumult of summer are gone; the mating
and singing and fighting are over; the growing and working and
watch-care done; the running even of the sap has ceased; the grip of
the little twigs has relaxed, and the leaves, for very weight of peace,
float off into the air, and all the wood, with empty hands, lies in the
after-summer sun, and dreams.

With empty hands in the same warm sun I lie and dream. The sounds of
summer have died away; but the roar of coming winter has not yet broken
over the barriers of the north. Above my head stretches a fanlike
branch of witch-hazel, its yellow leaves falling, its tiny, twisted
flowers just curling into bloom. The snow will fall before its yellow
straps have burned crisp and brown. But let it fall. It must melt
again; for as long as these pale embers glow the icy hands of winter
shall slip and lose their hold on the outdoor world.

And so I dream. The woods are at my back, the level meadow and wide
fields of corn-fodder stretch away in front of me to a flaming ridge of
oak and hickory. The sun is behind me over the woods, and the lazy air
glances with every gauzy wing and flashing insect form that skims the
sleepy meadow. But there is an unusual play of light over the grass, a
glinting of threads that enmesh the air as if the slow-swinging wind
were weaving gossamer of blown silk from the steeple-bush spindles
through the slanting reeds of the sun.

It is not the wind that weaves; it is a multitude of small spiders.
Here is one close to my face, out at the tip of a slender grass-stem,
holding on with its fore legs and kicking out backward with its hind
legs a tiny skein of web off into the air. The threads stream and sway
and lengthen, gather and fill and billow, and tug at their anchorage
till, caught in the dip of some wayward current, they lift the little
aeronaut from his hangar and bear him away through the sky.

Long before we dreamed of flight, this little voyager was coasting the
clouds. I can follow him far across the meadow in the cobweb basket as
his filmy balloon floats shimmering over the meadow sea.

Who taught him navigation? By what compass is he steering? And where
will he come to port? Perhaps his anchor will catch in a hard-hack on
the other side of the pasture; or perhaps some wil