d air-current will
sweep him over the woodtops, over the Blue Hills, and bear him a
hundred miles away. No matter. The wind bloweth where it listeth, and
there is no port where the wind never blows.

Yet no such ship would dare put to sea except in this soft and sunny
weather. The autumn seeds are sailing too--the pitching parachutes of
thistle and fall dandelion and wild lettuce, like fleets of tiny yachts
under sail--a breeze from a cut-over ridge in the woods blowing almost
cottony with the soft down of the tall lettuce that has come up thick
in the clearing.

As I watch the strowing of the winds, my melancholy slips away. One
cannot lie here in the warm but unquickening sun, and see this sower
crossing meadow and cornfield without a vision of waking life, of
fields again all green where now stands the fodder, of woods all full
of song as soon as this sowing and the sleeping of the seeds are done.
The autumn wind goeth forth to sow, and with the most lavish of hands.
He wings his seeds, and weights his seeds, he burrs them, rounds them,
and angles them; they fly and fall, they sink and swim, they stick and
shoot, they pass the millstones of the robins' gizzards for the sake of
a chance to grow. They even lie in wait for me, plucking me by the
coat-sleeve, fastening upon my trousers' leg and holding on until I
have walked with them into my very garden. The cows are forced to
carry them, the squirrel to hide them, the streams to whirl them on
their foaming drift into places where no bird or squirrel or wayward
breeze would go. Not a corner within the horizon but will get its
needed seed, not a nook anywhere, from the wind-swept fodder-field to
the deepest, darkest swamp, but will come to life and flower again with
the coming spring.

The leaves are falling, the birds are leaving, most of them having
already gone. Soon I shall hear the bugle notes of the last guard as
the Canada geese go over, headed swift and straight for the South. And
yonder stands the fodder, brown and dry, the slanting shocks securely
tied against the beating rains. How can one be melancholy when one
knows the meaning of the fodder, when one is able to find in it his
faith in the seasons, and see in it the beauty and the wisdom which has
been built into the round of the year?

To him who lacks this faith and understanding let me give a serene
October day in the woods. Go alone, lie down upon a bank where you can
get a large view of