from the clayey tabernacle to the house not; made
with hands--from dishonour to glory--let me turn theme over as so many
leaves.

The first of the November mornings, but the summer had tarried late, and
the wood to the south of our homestead lifted itself like a painted wall
against the sky--the squirrel was leaping nimbly and chattering gayly
among the fiery tops of the oaks or the dun foliage of the hickory, that
shot up its shelving trunk and spread its forked branches far over the
smooth, moss-spotted boles of the beeches, and the limber boughs of the
elms. Lithe and blithe he was, for his harvest was come.

From the cracked beech-burs was dropping the sweet, angular fruit,
and down from the hickory boughs with every gust fell a shower of
nuts--shelling clean and silvery from their thick black hulls.

Now and then, across the stubble-field, with long cars erect, leaped the
gray hare, but for the most part he kept close in his burrow, for rude
huntsmen were on the hills with their dogs, and only when the sharp
report of a rifle rung through the forest, or the hungry yelping of some
trailing hound startled his harmless slumber, might you see at the mouth
of his burrow the quivering lip and great timid eyes.

Along the margin of the creek, shrunken now away from the blue and gray
and yellowish stones that made its cool pavement, and projected in thick
layers from the shelving banks, the white columns of gigantic sycamores
leaped earthward, their bases driven, as it seemed, deep into the
ground--all their convolutions of roots buried out, of view. Dropping
into the stagnant waters below, came one by one the broad, rose-tinted
leaves, breaking the shadows of the silver limbs.

Ruffling and widening to the edges of the pools went the circles, as the
pale, yellow walnuts plashed into their midst; for here, too, grew the
parent trees, their black bark cut and jagged and broken into rough
diamond work.

That beautiful season was come when

"Rustic girls in hoods Go gleaning through the woods."

Two days after this, we said, my dear mate and I, we shall have a
holiday, and from sunrise till sunset, with our laps full of ripe nuts
and orchard fruits, we shall make pleasant pastime.

Rosalie, for so I may call her, was older than I, with a face of beauty
and a spirit that never flagged. But to-day there was heaviness in her
eyes, and a flushing in her cheek that was deeper than had been there
before.

Still she spok