orgeous show-bills, must you tread the path toward the sundown?
Good-by! Good-by! In that dreary land where you are going, the Kingdom
of the Ausgespielt, it may comfort you to recollect the young hearts you
have made happy in the days that were, but never more can be again.

THE COUNTY FAIR

Whether or not the name had an influence on the weather, I don't know.
Perhaps it did rain some years, but, as I remember, County Fair time
seems to have had a sky perfectly cloudless, with its blue only a little
dulled around the edges where it came close to the ground and the dust
settled on it. Things far off were sort of hazy, but that might have
been the result of the bonfires of leaves we had been having evenings
after supper. In Fair weather, when the sun had been up long enough
to get a really good start, it was right warm, but in the shade it
was cool, and nights and mornings there was a chill in the air that
threatened worse things to come.

The harvest is past, the summer is ended. Down cellar the swing-shelf is
cram-jam full of jellyglasses, and jars of fruit. Out on the hen-house
roof are drying what, when the soap-box wagon was first built, promised
barrels and barrels of nuts to be brought up with the pitcher of cider
for our comforting in the long winter evenings, but what turns out, when
the shucks are off, to be a poor, pitiful half-peck, daily depleted by
the urgent necessity of finding out if they are dry enough yet. Folks
are picking apples, and Koontz's cider-mill is in full operation. (Do
you know any place where a fellow can get some nice long straws?) Out in
the fields are champagne-colored pyramids, each with a pale-gold heap
of corn beside it, and the good black earth is dotted with orange blobs
that promise pumpkin-pies for Thanksgiving Day. No. Let me look again.
Those aren't pie-pumpkins; those are cow-pumpkins, and if you want to
see something kind of pitiful, I'll show you Abe Bethard chopping up
one of those yellow globes--with what, do you suppose? With the cavalry
saber his daddy used at Gettysburg.

The harvest is past, the summer is ended. As a result of all the good
feeding and the outdoor air we have had for three or four months past,
the strawberry shortcakes, and cherry-pies, and green peas, and
new potatoes, and string beans, and roasting-ears, and all such
garden-stuff, and the fresh eggs, broken into the skillet before Speckle
gets done cackling, and the cockerels we pick off t