t I
hope I looked a trifle like Nature, who was in the height of her being;
in a sort of tropical luxuriance, like a beautiful woman at the very
summit of maturity and perfection.

I put out my hands toward a clump of sumach--I was not cold, but its
brilliant warmth lured me as does a glowing fire. It permeated my very
being, and set my soul a-throbbing.

There had been rain, and then warmth, and October had caught all the
prismatic colors of the drops of water, and was giving them forth with
Southern prodigality. The birds bent over the swaying daisies, and sang
soft love-notes into their great, dark eyes, while I looked on in an
ecstasy of wonder and delight--the gold of the daisies, the gold of the
sunlight, and the glow in my heart, seeming in a way all one--part and
parcel of the munificence and cheering love of the Father. It is a
glorious world, and it is glorious to live therein. The very air about
me--the air I was breathing in, seemed to palpitate color and brilliant
beauty.

I talked to Duke about it, and he looked around him with a certain air
of admiration depicted on his noble, fond old face. Fanchon was
frivolous, as usual, and wanted to be running giddily about, hunting
rabbits and the like; but I made her sit beside me, for it seemed a
desecration every time the October silence of those woods was broken by
aught save the dropping of a ripened nut, or the whirr of a homing bird.

It was at the close of this mellow day that I sat in my library alone,
before a hickory fire. Alone, did I say? Nay, Mrs. Simpson sat before me
in the opposite rocker. You could not have seen her, or heard her, but
she was there, and was complaining of Mr. Simpson, saying he rarely ever
invited her to go anywhere; and as she talked I recalled a certain
evening when I had been her guest--included in an invitation to attend a
spectacular entertainment given by the country club, at a spot some
distance from our homes, and I said:

"Mrs. Simpson, I can offer you some recipes which I warrant you will
work infallibly; but they are like the recipe for determining the
interior condition of eggs, which says, put them in water; if they are
bad they will either sink or swim--I have forgotten which. Now try this
recipe I am about to give you, and it will either make Mr. Simpson
unwilling to take a step in the way of recreation without you, or it
will make him stalk forth by himself, as lonely as a crocus in early
March--I have forgott