ear people talk of _purple_. You have been wont to call
a gold guinea or a sovereign _yellow_--but if you have got one in your
pocket, place it on your palm, and in the light of that broom is it not
a _dirty brown_? You have an emerald ring on your finger--but how grey
it looks beside the _green_ of those brackens, that pasture, that wood!
Purple, yellow, and green, you have now seen, sir, for the first time in
your life. Widening and widening over your head, all the while you have
been gazing on the heather, the broom, the bracken, the pastures, and
the woods, have the eternal heavens been preparing for you a vision of
the sacred _Blue_. Is not that an Indigo Divine? Or, if you scorn that
mercantile and manufacturing image, steal that blue from the sky, and
let the lady of your love tinge but her eyelids with one touch, and a
saintlier beauty will be in her upward looks as she beseeches Heaven to
bless thee in her prayers! Set slowly--slowly--slowly--O Sun of Suns! as
may be allowed by the laws of Nature. For not long after Thou hast sunk
behind those mountains into the sea, will that celestial ROSY-RED be
tabernacled in the heavens!

Meanwhile, three of the dozen showers have so soaked and steeped our old
crazy carcass in refreshment, and restoration, and renewal of youth,
that we should not be surprised were we to outlive that raven croaking
in pure _gaiete du coeur_ on the cliff. Threescore and ten years!
Poo--'tis a pitiful span! At a hundred we shall cut capers--for twenty
years more keep to the Highland fling--and at the close of other twenty,
jig it into the grave to that matchless strathspey, the Reel of
Tullochgorum!

Having thus made our peace with last Summer, can we allow the Sun to go
down on our wrath towards the AUTUMN, whose back we yet see on the
horizon, before he turn about to bow adieu to our hemisphere? Hollo! I
meet us half-way in yonder immense field of potatoes, our worthy Season,
and among these peacemakers, the Mealies and the Waxies, shall we two
smoke together the calumet or cigar of reconciliation. The floods fell,
and the folk feared famine. The people whined over the smut in wheat,
and pored pale on the Monthly Agricultural Report. Grain grew greener
and greener--reapers stood at the crosses of villages, towns, and
cities, passing from one to another comfortless quaichs of sma' yill,
with their straw-bound sickles hanging idle across their shoulders, and
with unhired-looking faces, as ra