did; no tapping of the
woodpecker on the hollow tree, or the dead limb; no chattering of the
squirrel, as he gathers his winter store; no pattering of the faded
leaves, as they come so quietly down from their places; no falling of
the ripened nuts, loosened from their burs or shucks by the recent
frosts. All these sounds belong to the calm autumnal days, and while
they differ the whole heavens from the merry songs of spring, there is
nothing sad about them. No! No! nothing sad. I remember (and who that
was reared in the country does not) when I was a boy, how I went out
in the sunny days of autumn, after the frosts had painted the
hillsides, to gather chestnuts; and when the breeze rustled among the
branches, how the nuts came rattling down; and how if the winds were
still, I climbed into the trees and shook their tops, and how the
chestnuts pattered to the ground like a shower of hail. I remember the
squirrels how they chattered, and chased each other up and down the
trees, or leaped from branch to branch, gathering here and there a
nut, and scudding away to their store houses in the hollow trees,
providing in this season of plenty for the barrenness of the winter
months. I remember, too, how we gathered, in those same old autumnal
days, hickory-nuts and butter-nuts by the bushel; and how pleasant it
was in the long cold winter evenings, to sit around the great old
kitchen fire-place, cracking the nuts we had gathered when the green,
the yellow, the crimson, the brown, the grey, and the pale leaves were
on the trees. Pleasant evenings those seem to me now, as they come
floating down on the current of memory from the long past, and dear
are the faces of those that made up the tableaux as they were grouped
around those winter fires. Logs were blazing on the great hearth, and
the pineknots, thrown at intervals on the fire, gave a bold and
cheerful light throughout that capacious kitchen. I remember how the
winter wind went glancing over the house-top, whirling, and eddying,
and moaning around the corners, hissing under the door and sending its
cold breath in at every crevice; and how the windows rattled when the
blast came fiercest, and how the smoke would sometimes whirl down the
great chimney, I remember well where my father's chair was always
placed; and where my mother sat of those winter evenings, when her
household cares were over for the day, plying her needle, or knitting,
or darning stockings, or mending garments,