fests, quite involuntarily, a half apologetic air for showing himself unasked in such a goodly company.

I must add to my list of flowers still in bloom the slender gerardia, which I found this afternoon. My stroll took me up over the ledge and through the rocky sumachcovered pasture, where I kicked over now a yellow boletus, and now an Agaricus campestris, much the worse for wear, and wondered when our people would realize that they must know mushrooms as they know turnips before they eat them, and that then they could add very freely to the delicacies upon their tables.

My way led past our own reservoir, where the varied coloured trees, climbing the hill on the farther side, in the full glow of the westering sun, were reflected in the water, which, all of a tremor with a passing breeze, mingled their shades in a shimmer as of crinkled Venetian glass. - How odd it is, by the way, that we continually go to the artificial to find a simile for the natural effect which often so far surpasses it!

Leaving the crest of Rattlesnake Mountain on my left (how necessary it is for these hill towns to have a Rattlesnake Hill or Mountain in the neighbourhood - I hope

only as a survival in culture, an evidence of a past industry), and wandering along the soft, sandy road, I came to a tree where the boys presumably they were boyshad been clubbing chestnuts, the prickly burrs of which are now just opening. Of course I picked up a stick and tried my hand in the old way- just for a flyer, as it were. And what a flyer it was indeed! It reminded me of the way my sisters used to do it, only I fear that the infrequency with which the stick hit the tree would have excited the derision of even those well-meaning maidens. The baseball player who would have been able to "get on to my curves," would have shown a miracle of ingenuity. The net result of my industry was two chestnuts, not by any means ripe, I am sorry to say, but chestnuts nevertheless in the making. "While I was musing, the fire burned." While I was chestnutting, the sun sank behind the western hills, and I hastened on, hoping soon to find my road bending to the right and emerging into the valley. But alas! what had been a wellbeaten country road with a stone wall on one side, and a fence on the other, gradually changed into a mere open cart track and strayed away into the woods; first the

stone wall left me, and then the fence; instead of turning toward the valley I was gradually tending around the shoulder of the hill, and burying myself deeper and deeper in the woods. "And all the air a solemn stillness held," a silence which seemed no less a silence though it was full of the hum of crickets and other insects. By the way, have you ever lain awake at night, even in the depth of the winter, and found your ears filled with a humming and a rustling, until you wondered whether it would be possible to distinguish any other sound through it all, and then speculated whether there was really any soundwhether it was all the music of the spheres, whether it was external to you, whether it was the rushing of your own life's tide through your blood-vessels, or whether it was after all pure imagination?

The damp air of the evening, like the warm sun of midday, brings out the pleasant smell of the fallen leaves, and their rustle under the feet is agreeable; but I feared lest I was being caught in a cul-desac, or perhaps should be led out into the highway at too many miles' distance from home for so late an hour. I therefore retraced my steps, and was astonished to

find the brightness of the lemon glow in the west, when I emerged from the shadowy aisles of the wood, while on the other side of me the flame-coloured leaves of the sassafras and the light yellow garments of the hickories and birches, relieved against their darker brethren, seemed the forerunners of another day.

Passing along the road, here and there a warm breath from across the drier grass clove the cool, damp air of the gathering twilight; the glow on the sky changed from lemon to deep orange, against which the hills rested in nearly black masses; the glow narrowed, and above it in surprising brilliancy shone the evening star like a glittering gem, while in front rose our lovely tapering church spire, of which we are proud, - that familiar finger post of the Christian world which we all love whatever be the peculiarities of our various theories.

OCTOBER 7, 1893.

III.

THIS has been a typical autumn day; glittering and cool in the morning with high wind; thermometer fifty-six degrees; a clear blue sky gradually flecked with passing clouds; then heavier and denser masses, becoming more and more numerous until the whole heavens formed a leaden vault in delicately shaded tones, with here and there a break from time to time, through which the bright sun lighted up for a moment the tinted landscape.

I started to explore the woodland road wherein darkness overtook me last week. Passing through the village street, the fragrance of the late apples carried me back at once to the great show at Chicago. You cannot help remembering, if you were not so unfortunate as to have missed it, that the most refreshing experience at the Fair was a walk through the fruit-lined passages of the Horticultural Building, the delicious odour of the ripe fruit appealing more directly to your sense of bien-être than