OCTOBER,

THE Cool and temperate breezes that prevail at this time almost constantly from the west, attended with a clear sky, announce the brilliant month of October with a climate that alternately chills the frame with frosty vapors by night and enlivens the heart with beauty and sunshine by day. At sunrise the villagers are gathered round their fires shivering with cold; the chirping insects also have crept into their shelters and are silent. But ere the sun has gained half his meridian height the villagers have forsaken their fires, and are busy in the orchards beneath the glowing sunshine; and the insects, aroused from their torpor and warmed into new life, are again chirping as merrily as in August, and multitudes that could hardly creep with torpor in the morning are now darting and spinning in the grassy meadows.

There are occasional dull and cloudy days in October, the dreary precursors of approaching winter; but they are generally bright and clear, and unequalled by those of any other month in salubrity. There are no sleeping mists drawn over the skies to obscure the transparency of the atmosphere; but far as the eye can reach, the distant hills lift up their heads with a clear, unclouded outline, and the blue arch of heaven preserves its deep azure down almost to the horizon. In the mornings of such days a white fleecy cloud is settled upon the streams and lowlands, in which the early sunbeams are refracted with all the myriad hues of dawn, forming halos and imperfect rainbows that seem to be pictured on a

groundwork of drifted snow. By this vapor, nearly motionless at sunrise, we may trace the winding course of the small rivers far along through the distant prospect. But the sun quickly dissipates this fleecy cloud. As the winds float it slowly and gracefully over the plains, it melts into transparency; and ere the sun has gained ten degrees in his orbit, the last feathery fragment has vanished and left him in the clear blue firmament without one shadow to tarnish his glory.

October is the most brilliant of the months, unsurpassed in the clearness of its skies and in the wonderful variety of tints that are sprinkled over all vegetation. He who has an eye for beautiful colors must ever admire the scenery of this last month of foliage and flowers. As Nature loses the delicacy of her charms, she is more lavish of the gaudy decorations with which she embroiders her apparel. While she appears before us in her living attire, from spring to autumn she is constantly changing her vesture with each passing month. The flowers that spangle the green turf or wreathe themselves upon the trees and vines, and the herbage with all its various shades of verdure, constitute, with their successive changes, her spring and summer adornment; but ere the fall of the leaf she makes herself garlands of the ripened foliage, and crowns the brows of her mountains and the bosoms of her groves with the most beautiful array.

Though the present is a melancholy time of the year, we are preserved from cheerless reflections by the brightness of the sunshine and the interminable beauty of the landscape. The sky in clear weather is of the deepest blue; and the ocean and the lakes, slightly ruffled by the October winds, which are seldom tranquil, have a peculiar depth of coloring, unwitnessed when their surface is calm. Diverted by the unusual charms of Nature, while we look with a mournful heart upon the graves of the

flowers, we turn our eyes upward and around us, where the woods are glowing like a wilderness of roses, and forget in our ravishment the beautiful things we have lost. As the flowers wither and vanish from our sight, their colors seem to revive in the foliage of the trees, as if each dying blossom had bequeathed its beauty to the forest boughs, that had protected it during the year. The trees are one by one putting aside their vestures of green and slowly assuming their new robes of many hues. From the beginning to the end of the month the landscape suffers a complete metamorphosis; and October may be said to represent in the successive changes of its aspect all the floral beauty of spring and summer.

Unaffected by the late frosts, the grass is still green from the valleys to the hill-tops, and many a flower is still smiling upon us as if there were no winter in the year. Many fair ones still linger in their cheerful but faded bowers, the emblems of contentment, seeming perfectly happy if they can but greet a few beams of sunshine to temper the frosty gales. In wet places I still behold the lovely neottia with its small white plumes arranged in a spiral line about their stems, and giving out the delicate incense of a lily. The purple gerardia, too, has not yet forsaken us, and the gentians will wait till another month before they wholly leave our borders.

If we quit the fields we find in the gardens a profusion of lovely exotics. Dahlias and fuchsias, and many other plants that were created to embellish other climes, are rewarding the hands that cherished them with their fairest forms and hues. All these are destined, not, like the flowers of our own clime, to live throughout their natural period, and then sink quietly into decay, but to be cut down by frosts in the very summer of their loveliness.