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 with the most beautiful array.

groves

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. Already are their leaves withered and blackened, while the native plants unseared by the frost, grow bright

er and brighter with every new morning, until they are finally seared by the icy breath of November.

But to the forests we must look to behold the fairest spectacle of the season, now glowing with the infinitely varied and constantly multiplying tints of a summer sunset. The first changes appear in the low grounds, where vegetation is exposed to the earliest blights, and is prematurely ripened by the alternation of chill dews and sunshine. Often in the space of one night the leaves of the trees are metamorphosed into flowers, as if the dewdrops brought with them the hues of the beautiful clouds from which they fell. But Nature, while decorating some trees in one uniform color, scatters over the remainder a gentle sprinkling of every hue.

It is my delight during this month to ramble in the field and wood, to take note of these changes as they happen day by day. Each morning witnesses a new aspect in the face of Nature like each passing moment that attends the brightening and fading of the evening sky. The landscape we visited but a few days since is to-day like a different prospect, save in the arrangement of the grounds. Beauty has suddenly awoke upon the face of a dull and homely wood, and variety has sprung up in the midst of tiresome uniformity. There are patches of brightly tinted shrubbery that seem to have risen during the night from the bed of the earth where yesterday there was but a dull uniform green, and when surrounded by the unfaded grasses, they resemble little flower-plats embosomed in verdure. As the month advances one tree after another partakes of this beautiful transformation. All the shades of red, yellow, and purple are resplendent from different species. It seems as if the departed flowers. of summer had revisited the earth, and were wreathing their garlands around the brows of the woods and the mountains.

On every side of our walk various plats of herbage gleam upon our sight, each with some unmingled shade of some lovely hue; and every shrub and every leafy herb presents the appearance of a scattered variety of bouquets, wreaths, and floral embroidery. The farms in the lowlands display wide fields of intermingled orange and russet, and the shrubs of different colors that spring up among them in clumps and knolls add to the spectacle an endless variety of splendor. The creeping herbs and trailing vines, some begemmed with fruit, display the same variety of tinting, as if designed for wreaths to garland the gray rocks, and to yield a smile to the face of Nature that shall make glad the heart of the solitary rambler, who is ready to weep over the fair objects that have fled.

Day and night have at length about equally divided the light and the darkness. The time of the latter harvest is nearly past, and the winter fruits are mostly gathered into barns. The mornings and evenings are cold and cheerless, and the west-wind has grown harsh and uncomfortable. The bland weather of early autumn is rapidly gliding from our year. Night is continually encroaching upon the dominion of day. The white frosts already glitter in the arbors of the summer dews, and the cold north-wind is whistling rudely in the haunts of the sweet summer zephyrs. The scents of fading leaves and of the ripened harvest have driven out the delicate incense of the flowers whose fragrant offerings have all ascended to heaven. Dark threatening clouds occasionally frown upon us as they gather for a few hours about the horizon, the melancholy omens of the coming of winter. But there is pleasantness still in a rural excursion, and when the cold mists of dawn have passed away and the hoar-frost has melted in the warm sunshine, it is my delight to go out into the field to take note of the last beautiful things of summer that linger on the threshold of autumn.