of birds--a
buoyant caravel. Or, in the stiller weather, the infrequent fall of
leaves took place quietly, with no proclamation of ruin, in the privacy
within the branches. While nearly all the woods were still fresh as
streams, you might see that here or there was one, with an invincible
summer smile, slowly consuming, in defiance of decay. Life destroyed
that autumn, not death.

The novelist would be at a loss had we a number of such years. He would
lose the easiest landscape--for the autumn has among her facile ways the
way of allowing herself to be described by rote. But there were no
regions of crimson woods and yellow--only the grave, cool, and cheerful
green of the health of summer, and now and then that deep bronzing of the
leaves that the sun brought to pass. Never did apples look better than
in those still vigorous orchards. They shone so that lamps would hardly
be brighter. The apple-gathering, under such a sun, was nearly as warm
and brilliant as a vintage; and indeed it was of the Italian autumn that
you were reminded. There were the same sunburnt tones, the same brown
health. There was the dark smile of chestnut woods as among the
Apennines.

For it was chiefly within the woods that the splendid autumn without
pathos gave delight. The autumn _with_ pathos has a way there of
overwhelming her many fragrances in the general odour of dead leaves
generalized. That year you could breathe all the several sweet scents,
as discriminated and distinct as those of flowers on the tops of
mountains--warm pine and beech as different as thyme and broom,
unconfused. Even the Spring, with her little divided breezes of
hawthorn, rose, and lilac, was not more various.

Moreover, while some of the woods were green, none of the fields were so.
In their sunburnt colours were to be seen "autumn tints" of a far
different beauty from that of a gaudy decay. Dry autumn is a general
lover of simplicity, and she sweeps a landscape with long plain colours
that take their variations from the light. When the country looks "burnt
up," as they say who are ungrateful for the sun, then are these colours
most tender. Grass, that had lost its delicacy in the day when the last
hay was carried, gets it again. For a little time it was--new-reaped--of
something too hard a green; then came dry autumn along, and softened it
into a hundred exquisite browns. Dry autumn does beautiful things in
sepia, as the water-colour artist did