enerous side
of everything."

She rested her hand fondly on his arm, and he took it into his own.

One evening the pair were out for that sunset walk which their young
blood so relished, and which often led them, as it did this time, across
the wide, open commons behind the town, where the unsettled streets were
turf-grown, and toppling wooden lamp-posts threatened to fall into the
wide, cattle-trodden ditches.

"Fall is coming," said Mary.

"Let it come!" exclaimed John; "it's hung back long enough."

He looked about with pleasure. On every hand the advancing season was
giving promise of heightened activity. The dark, plumy foliage of the
china trees was getting a golden edge. The burnished green of the great
magnolias was spotted brilliantly with hundreds of bursting cones, red
with their pendent seeds. Here and there, as the sauntering pair came
again into the region of brick sidewalks, a falling cone would now and
then scatter its polished coral over the pavement, to be gathered by
little girls for necklaces, or bruised under foot, staining the walk
with its fragrant oil. The ligustrums bent low under the dragging weight
of their small clustered berries. The oranges were turning. In the wet,
choked ditches along the interruptions of pavement, where John followed
Mary on narrow plank footways, bloomed thousands of little unrenowned
asteroid flowers, blue and yellow, and the small, pink spikes of the
water pepper. It wasn't the fashionable habit in those days, but Mary
had John gather big bunches of this pretty floral mob, and filled her
room with them--not Mrs. Riley's parlor--whoop, no! Weeds? Not if Mrs.
Riley knew herself.

So ran time apace. The morning skies were gray monotones, and the
evening gorgeous reds. The birds had finished their summer singing.
Sometimes the alert chirp of the cardinal suddenly smote the ear from
some neighboring tree; but he would pass, a flash of crimson, from one
garden to the next, and with another chirp or two be gone for days. The
nervy, unmusical waking cry of the mocking-bird was often the first
daybreak sound. At times a myriad downy seed floated everywhere, now
softly upward, now gently downward, and the mellow rays of sunset turned
it into a warm, golden snow-fall. By night a soft glow from distant
burning prairies showed the hunters were afield; the call of unseen wild
fowl was heard overhead, and--finer to the waiting poor man's ear than
all other sounds--came at reg