Not far above the twin cascades, the brook formerly shot over a polished ledge almost steep enough to form a perfect fall. Here a very unusual and interesting change had been worked in the rock and the course of the water by the action of frost. Just at the point where the polished rock bed of the stream was steepest, a crack had opened at right angles with the current. Of course water had filled this fissure and deepened it until in some winter night a sound of rending must have startled the forest and echoed afar down the gorge. The front of the ledge, measuring twenty yards or more from side to side and nearly half that distance from top to bottom, broke from its ancient foundation and slipped forward about eighteen inches, thus forming a perpendicular crevasse sixty feet long and twenty feet deep. Into this the stream plunged and vanished from sight. Standing just below the crevasse and looking up the smooth face of the ledge, I could see the eager water coming towards me, hurrying forward its amber masses, bubbles, sheets of foam, and yellow leaves dropped by the ripening trees. As it seemed about to hurl itself upon me and sweep me down its bed, it disappeared.

When the water reached the bottom of the crevasse, it turned aside and flowed at right angles to its course until a fault in the rock allowed it to steal out into the daylight. The crevasse was full of sounds, and amid the splashing, gurgling, and roaring of the water, the ear could fancy that it detected wild cries, sobs, and moans.

Above this rift and cavern of wild waters came many a rod of steep climbing. Again and again an impassable cliff seemed to bar our way, but each time the stream showed us how, by a zigzag or a long diagonal, we could avoid the abrupt face of the rock and find a way to a higher level. Finally, after nearly four hours of climbing we found ourselves in a moist and mossy hollow between two of the summits of the mountain. Northward the rocks rose abruptly to the wooded crest of the highest ridge, southward they rose to the dome-shaped ledge which forms the best height for observation, wind and fire having left it as bald as an egg. It was impossible to cross the moist hollow dry shod, for at no point was it less than a rod wide and in parts it was forty or fifty yards from ledge to ledge. The brown water stood in pools amid the sphagnum beds and between the stems of trees. Several paths led downward between the low spruces to these pools, but we shunned them. Human feet had not trodden them, unless, indeed, the bear hunter had passed that way and set his traps directly across them. In one place I saw where a bear had recently walked across the sphagnum, leaving the imprint of his huge foot clearly stamped upon the moss.

The view from the dome of Paugus was autumnal in tone. Great masses of cold clouds were sweeping across the blue sky, urged forward by a blustering northwest wind. Wherever the spruce growth upon the mountains was interrupted by deciduous trees, delicate shades of red, yellow, or russet lay in patches between the sombre tones of the evergreens. In spots brilliant scarlet maples stood out boldly, but as a rule the new colors were not pronounced but merely suggestive of the gorgeous transformation soon to be perfected. In the hollows, especially those in which “harricanes” had been overgrown by mountain ash, sumac, and similar perishable wood, the autumnal tints were more prevalent and stronger. The only flowers upon the mountain-top were a few small asters with highly scented leaves, and a goldenrod (macrophylla) with large blossoms and coarse leaves.

Old Shag is not high enough to rival Chocorua or Passaconaway with its views, but it affords the only really satisfactory chance of studying those two mountains from a point between them. Chocorua varies strangely in its outlines from different points of view. From the south it looks like a huge lion couchant; from the Albany intervale it is an irregular ridge resembling a breaking wave; from Paugus it seems more like a giant fortress, with battered ramparts lifted high against the sky. A slide, invisible from other points, is seen to extend from the western foot of the peak far down into the forests of the Paugus valley. North of it a ridge densely grown with old spruce runs from the peak northwestward. It is one of the few parts of Chocorua not given up to deciduous trees. Beyond it rises the Champney Falls brook which flows northward into Swift River.

Passaconaway from the Bearcamp valley is one of the most perfect of pyramids; from Paugus it is a rough hump of sinister outline and color. The spruces upon it grow so thickly that it is hard to force a way through them, yet they spring from sides so steep that it seems a marvel that any soil or vegetation can cling to the rocks. A slide of great length shows its scar upon the eastern face, and serves to emphasize the fact that this side of Passaconaway is really less of a slope than of a continuous precipice nearly three thousand feet from summit to plain. In these almost inaccessible forests several birds from the Canadian fauna are occasionally found. I have seen there in summer both kinds of the three-toed woodpeckers; Canada grouse or spruce partridges have been shot there this autumn, and the moose-bird, or Canada jay, is occasionally seen near the lumber camps.

In descending a mountain in the afternoon which has been climbed in the morning, many new effects of light and shade, color, and even of outline, are observable. This may be puzzling to the guide who does not thoroughly know his path, but it is the one redeeming feature in a homeward scramble to those who are weary enough to regard their second view of a mountain-side as an anti-climax to the triumphant ascent of a new peak. Paugus Falls were more beautiful with the pallor of the afternoon around them, than they were with the southeastern sun shining into their rushing bubbles. They were whiter and the water consequently looked greater in volume. Again we wondered how such rare beauty could have been hidden so long in an untrodden forest, and, wondering, we blazed the trees so that those who might come after us could follow without perplexity the easy and beautiful way which we had been fortunate enough to find.

When we reached the old trail, about five o’clock, the woods seemed dark and the penetrating coolness of an autumn night was in the air. Twenty minutes later we emerged in the blackberry tangle by the abandoned saw-mill, and found wagons and warm wraps waiting for us. As we looked back towards the golden sunset, the dark dome of Old Shag stood boldly out against the sky. Fire and wind had left scars upon its face, and nature originally made it so rough in outline that “Toadback” is tellingly descriptive of its shape. Toads have their jewels, and so has Paugus, hidden in the shadows of its eastern flank.

MY HEART’S IN THE HIGHLANDS.

No matter how tightly the body may be chained to the wheel of daily duties, the spirit is free, if it so pleases, to cancel space and to bear itself away from noise and vexation into the secret places of the mountains. Well it is for him who labors early and late at the desk, if his soul can thus spread its wings and soar to deep forests, clear lakes, and rugged mountain peaks, drawing from memory, imagination, and sweet forecast, something to inspire itself to patient action, and something to strengthen the heart in its wish to do its appointed task manfully. As these bright October days slip by and my wheel of daily duties spins round and round in that granite prison called University Hall, my memory takes me back to fair Chocorua. I remember the 6th of October in the year 1884. The sun struggled through soft gray clouds and gazed upon a world of magical opposites. Every maple in a hundred townships blazed with scarlet or gold; yet soft and cold, wrapping the earth from Chocorua’s horn to the sand at the lake shore, the first snow of autumn sparkled in the rays of the rising sun. Skies of blue, forests of fire, fields of snow,—those were the delights of that matchless October dawning.

If the wheel grows too noisy I come back from these visions to my desk and its papers, and open dozens of letters from all over our broad country, from Europe, Japan, Mexico, and from distant India, whence some Harvard soldier of the Cross writes to ask tidings of his alma mater. In his day every John knew every William, and the roll of the University never climbed beyond the hundreds. Now the questioner at my side wonders how near we shall come to having three thousand students this year; while the prophet declares that in five years or less Harvard will have distanced Cambridge and Oxford, and become the greatest English-speaking University in the world. Even now her students do not all speak English. Aside from the scores of American youths who hear only light-weight silver dollar English at home, and who learn little that is better at school, there are many who come to Harvard from far-away foreign homes. The tall Bulgarian with his dark eyes full of poetry and fire; the patient Russian Jew, exiled from a cruel land, and struggling night and day to win an education and a fortune in the home of the free; the dashing young Norwegian, with winning, deferential manners and a light in his blue eyes which speaks of his own glaciers and dark fjords; the gifted Japanese, absorbing philosophy or science with such readiness as to make his slower American competitor blush with shame; the angular Armenian, with his keen, thin face and nervous hands; the self-possessed Costa Rican, the moody Icelander and his taciturn but clear-headed neighbor from Newfoundland,—all are beside me taking turns with their American fellow-students in hurrying my wheel until the day is done.

When the day is done, and pale sunset colors lie in the sky behind the witching iron tracery in the great western gateway, my soul goes northward again into that other October when the early snow melted, and the winds blew in the fair Chocorua land. I go back to a gusty afternoon when we rowed our boat the length of the lakes and landed upon the silent shore of the old Doe farm. It was our first visit to the white sand of that beach, to the little footpath leading upward through the orchard, and to the tumble-down cottage with its huge chimney, in which the swifts had found no smoke for twenty long years. Our first visit,—yet now the anchor of life is so strongly fixed on that shore, and the family fairies so firmly domiciled on that hearth, that our first voyage of discovery seems as far off as the time when “Kit Colombus sailed from the Papal See.”

We wandered through the rooms of the cottage, peeped at the sky through the cracks in its roof, noted the pewee’s nest on the wainscoting in the east room, and whirled the old flax-wheel which stood in the dark attic. Then, passing the ancient maples behind the great barn, we strolled on and on through the pastures until a faint path led us to the lonely lake among the dingles, almost at the foot of Chocorua. Softly descending the steep path to the edge of the green water, we saw five black ducks rise from the lake and fly from us over the oaks. The rush of their wings is in my ears to this day, and my eyes recall the clouds which loomed over the peak and swept down upon the lake, bringing much cold wind and a little rain. From the storm-clouds a small hawk came circling down towards the troubled water and tossing birches. As he soared above us, seemingly protesting against our coming into the charmed vale, I shot him. The strong wings gave one spasmodic beat, the fierce head fell forward, and the body shot downward and struck the sand at our feet. We had claimed dominion by force of arms, and when we next saw the lake, it was ours in law.

The wheel turns fastest in the University prison house when pale boys and gaunt young men come to me with confidences of their life-long hope to come to fair Harvard, of mothers’ sacrifices, and fathers’ toil, of the parson’s chiding against the influence of the non-sectarian college, and the schoolmaster’s prophecy that Cambridge will be all proud looks and cold hearts, and finally of their own determination to work their way through, no matter what the cost in comfort and energy. It is the same soul-stirring story, whether it speaks from the butternut-colored coat from Georgia, the coarse gray homespun from Cape Breton, or the shiny, long-tailed black frock from Nebraska. Beseeching, honest, or searching eyes look straight into the heart, and the heart would not be good for much if it did not grow warmer under their scrutiny. Generally all except the least useful and adaptable of such men find ways of earning much of that which is needed to keep them decently clad and safely fed during their years of study; but it is anxious work starting them on self-support, and helping them to drive away homesickness.

There is a feeling of gritting sand and the lack of oil in the wheel when purse-proud, over-dressed, loud-voiced, tired-eyed youths drift to me in their attempts to escape parts of their college duties. They have come from shoddy homes to mix shoddy with the honest stuff of Harvard life. It would be better for them, for us, and for all their associates, if they never set foot on scholastic ground. Still they serve as a foil to the noble-hearted men of wealth who are the glory of a college,—men who are strong in their willingness to aid others, pure in heart, active in body, loyal to the ideals of the University.

One reason that the wheel of duty turns hard is to be found in the multitude of human atoms pressing against it. The present system of college government was well adapted for the management of five or six hundred men, for it is an easy task for an officer of keen sympathies and a good memory to carry even more than six hundred men in his mind, and to know their faces, names, and general record. Now that the six hundred have become two thousand, and the same system is applied, each officer being expected to know something of every student, the memory gives way, interest weakens, and discipline through acquaintance becomes impossible. Here and there individual students stand out conspicuously and become well-known figures in the crowd; but it is more likely to be through their success in football than in their studies. The man who attains “Grade A” in all his studies may be dull-eyed and dingy; but the half-back on the university eleven cannot fail to have in him some of the qualities of the hero.

On the football field of a Saturday afternoon I am less likely to let my thoughts wander away to Chocorua than when at my desk. Something akin to the wild north wind seems surging down old Jarvis when the crimson rush-line guards its bunch of ball-carriers as they fly round the left end, blocking, interfering, sweeping down opposing arms, hurling themselves against crouching tacklers, and finally falling across the line for the triumphant touchdown. That Chocorua north wind is as irresistible in its way, when in October it hurls itself from the mountains and lashes the lake till foam flies in white masses over the crests of the breaking waves. Such winds often arise suddenly, and in a moment change the placid water, full of its reflections of gay forest and lofty peak, into a turbulent mass of waves. I well remember a soft, hazy morning when we rowed a heavy flat-bottomed boat to the northern end of the lake, returning about noon. When in the middle of the pond, the wind caught us, and, turning the boat sideways, drove it towards a shallow cove lined with boulders. Every wave dashed spray and water over the gunwales, and the most vigorous rowing availed nothing against the furious wind. It was not until I could jump overboard in the shoal water and push the boat before me out of the wind that I really regained the mastery of it.

About the middle of October a vast regiment of birds passes over the Bearcamp valley. On the 13th of October, 1889, I counted and recognized 488 birds. Of these, 173 were crows, flying from the northeast towards the southwest in two great flocks. They passed far above the forests, many of them being much above the tops of the highest mountains. On the same day I counted 143 juncos, which were peppered all over fields, roads, small thickets, pasture bushes, and woods of small height. Wherever we strolled the little cowled heads turned to watch us, or the white V-shaped tail-feathers flashed as the juncos flew from us. The white-throated sparrows were almost always with them, coming, I doubt not, from the same breeding-grounds, and bent upon reaching the same winter-quarters, or havens even farther south than those which juncos like. Now and then a white-crowned sparrow is to be seen among flocks of this kind. Those who watch for them are apt to see many white-throats, which they try to persuade themselves are the rarer species, but when the eye at last rests upon a white-crown there is no doubting his identity.

The golden-crested kinglets were present in great numbers on the same 13th of October, 1889, and as they passed through the evergreens they accomplished a marvelous amount of effective house-cleaning. With them or near them chickadees, red nuthatches, white nuthatches, and brown creepers took part in the keen inspection of the trees, and woe came to the insect which fell under their eyes.

Among the other birds which I recorded that day were robins, a hermit thrush, bluebirds, yellow-rumped warblers, solitary vireos, a flock of thirty-five goldfinches, a good many sparrows of various kinds, blue jays, one or two kinds of woodpeckers, several hawks, and a flock of black ducks. They formed the rear guard of the grand army, and as the leaves rustled down over them it was easy to imagine snowflakes gathering in the northern clouds and waiting for a summons to begin their soft descent upon the abandoned earth.

Bird voices sometimes mingle with the hum and roar of my duty-wheel. Opposite my office window are two tall pine-trees, almost the only evergreens in the college yard. These trees swarm with the alien sparrows, whose clamor at times is almost deafening. Better three months of utter silence than such bird music as this. Each year, as autumn deepens into winter, I watch the immigrant sparrow to see whether he is not learning that migration southward in the season of snow is wise and comfortable. He does wander somewhat, already, when food fails, and it will not be strange if, as years pass, he should acquire by sympathetic vibration something of the swing of the migratory pendulum.

When I walk slowly home from my office past Christ Church and the silent field of quaintly lettered stones, past the old elm within whose shade Washington took command of the Colonial army, and past Cotton Mather’s gold chanticleer holding high his ancient head against the rosy afterglow, I seem to see beyond all these things the crouching lion of Chocorua. Waking or dreaming, the outline of that peak is always stamped upon my northern horizon, and the north is the point to which my face turns as surely as does the needle, whenever my face, like the needle, is left to settle its direction in accordance with its controlling affinities. In these October days the picture of Chocorua which haunts me is not a summer picture. Far from it. In it the leaves are falling, drifting down like snow, birds are silent, nervous, always on the alert for danger; new ledges show upon the mountain-sides, new vistas have opened through the forests, and spots which, when behind their August leaf mantles seemed dark and secret, are now as open as the day. The brooks are more noisy, and easily seen, the grouse fly afar off; if one wishes a flower he must pluck the witch-hazel or let the bitter yarrow or the last clusters of goldenrod and asters satisfy him. Nature seems preoccupied and inclined to tell the visitor to see what he wants, and to take what he can find, but to let her alone.

THE VINTAGE OF THE LEAVES.

Friday, October 21, was observed by Harvard University as a holiday,—Columbus, while hunting for something else, having on that day, four hundred years ago, rediscovered America for the Europeans. On the same day, four hundred years ago, the Americans discovered Columbus, a weary and worn mariner, nearing the shore in a small and feebly-rigged ship. At that time America was much more of a boon to the explorer than he seemed likely to be to the continent.

I left Cambridge about the time the sun reached it, and gained the valley of the Bearcamp at 1 P. M. There are some days in the year which seem to have happened upon the wrong calendar day. They are too cold or too warm to keep company with the days which go before and after. This was not one of them. It was a model late October day, with clear air, a rushing wind, dark blue-gray clouds moving fast across a pale blue sky, leaves flying before the wind, and with ruffled water full of cold lights, though in spots increasing in its reflections the blue of the sky. Marvelous colors were spread upon the face of the meadows, and crept up the sides of the hills. The world was in gay attire, gayer even than the towns this day decked out in honor of the Genoese.

Gazing out of the train window, I have seen the Sandwich range from afar over the melting greens of spring, the rich verdure of summer, and the cold, still snow of winter. To-day I saw it framed in russet and carmine,—the colors of the oak-clad hills of Wakefield. The peak of Chocorua was capped by a dark slate-colored cloud from which rain seemed to be falling. Behind or above the other mountains of the range the same threatening vapors hung. As the train sped onward, past Ossipee Lake, over the Bearcamp, and up to the West Ossipee station, the clouds rolled away and a flood of clear sunlight poured its revealing rays into the hidden colors of the distant forests. From cold, dark masses in which black rocks were no darker than gloomy groves, the mountains’ sides suddenly became aglow with warm tones. The far-reaching view suggested a painter’s palette, upon which he had been daubing his colors from the tubes. Here he laid on a mass of dark green, there crimson, and next to it pale yellow. Then buff and orange, scarlet and blood-red pleased him, and he rubbed them upon spare areas. Cobalt and ultramarine added here and there, with now and then a dash of silvery white or a broad band of burnt sienna, served to make the scarlets more intense and the yellows more aggressive.

Driving in an open wagon from West Ossipee to the Chocorua House, I found a heavy overcoat, warm gloves, and a fur robe essential to comfort, especially on coming from the steam-heated cars into the racing northwest wind. As we sped through groves and across meadows, my eyes devoured the wonderful coloring of all that had once been green. I could see nothing else, think of nothing else. The contrast to our summer coloring could not have been much sharper if I had been transported to the sanguinary groves and pastures of the red planet Mars. Even the birds which rose from the roadside and whirled away before the wind seemed less interesting, so absorbing were the marvels of coloring in foliage from ancient oak to tender grasses. A flock of birds seemed to dance through the sunlight across the road, yet when I looked after them they were only beech leaves hurried along by the wind. A cloud of leaves, picked up by an eddy of the air and tossed high above the trees, suddenly became bluebirds and sparrows speeding away from the wagon across the pasture. Crows, few in number, and unusually wary, were not so easily mistaken for leaves, nor were the robins, which occasionally rose in flocks from the grass and sought the branches of leafless maples or butternuts.

After a hasty dinner I left the hotel and crossed field and copse to the outlet of the Chocorua lakes. The third lake, with its deep, dark water and its grove of lofty white pines shutting it in from distant views, is one of the most daintily lovely nooks in this region of beauty and grandeur. Crows love the dark pines, wild ducks float in their shadows, and many a mink has been trapped at the end of the dam. I found no life stirring in woods or water, so stepping cautiously along the mouldering logs of the dam, I gained the farther shore and crossed a broad, rock-strewn pasture, once covered by a growth of lofty pines. I know not how many years ago they fell or were felled, but this I do know, that scores of pitch-soaked knots are hidden in their ruins and among the ferns and bushes which have sprung from the decaying stumps. Many is the winter evening in town that I have sat by the fireside and gazed into the red flame of the blazing “light-wood” gathered in happy October days from this old pasture. As the pitch grew hot and burst through the dry wood, whining and whistling, blowing out long jets of white smoke and slender tongues of flame, its voice and warmth have carried me back in spirit to the brown beds of fern, the busy chipmunks under the old oak in the wall, or to the mayflowers gathered in spring from the edges of the lingering snow-banks. I passed a ledge of rocks on which I had seen a woodchuck sunning himself last August, and I recalled how he had squeezed himself into a little cave in the ledge only to find me peering in after him, and quite able to reach him with a stick. His method of escape from me was characteristic. Grunting and snarling, he spent half his time in threatening to come out and attack me, and the other half in undermining himself and poking the earth with his nose into the hole through which I was looking. In five minutes he had completely covered the opening and sunk his plump body out of reach of my probe. Later in the season I had a young woodchuck which had been partly tamed escape from captivity by gnawing his way through a thick pine board. The same individual repeatedly climbed up six feet from the floor on the coarse wire netting which formed the front of his cage, so that in future I shall not think it strange if I see a woodchuck climb a tree. His eccentricity also carried him to the point of devouring nearly a third of the carcass of a freshly-killed red squirrel, although an abundance of clover and young vegetables were close at hand ready for his dinner.

My walk took me up the western side of the lake to my own land and cottage. Robins rose from the ground in small flocks, a few tree sparrows and juncos flew from a plowed field by the wall, and two crows were feeding on swampy ground by a brook. It was to them that the land really belonged, not to me,—a waif from the city. So a flock of white-throats thought, as I disturbed them feeding upon the chaff at the back door of my barn. They flew into a bush on which a few dry leaves swung. While still watching them, as I supposed, I discovered that they had vanished, the wagging leaves alone remaining. In the orchard a few red apples hung, and gleamed like polished stones. One which grew upon a wild tree in the edge of the wood swung near the ground, and sharp little teeth had bitten out pieces from its side. Some of the fruit which lay upon the ground had been gnawed away until its seeds could be reached. Man eats the pulp and throws away the seeds, the mice and squirrels waste the pericarp solely to gain the seeds. Perhaps in this case man would have thrown away both apple and seeds had he tasted the bitter, wild fruit.

The lake was lower by a foot than I had ever before seen it in the autumn. In August it had washed the bushes on its dikes; now a yard or more of sand tempted a stroller to follow its fair rim past wood and meadow. Along my shore of the lake the natural dike is in places fully seven feet high. It has been made during the centuries by the “thrust” of the ice which results from the expansion of the ice-field by day following its contraction by night. On a sandy shore the expanding ice pushes up a little ridge of silt, and works it higher and higher as the ice mass rises during the winter. If the edge of the ice meets an obstacle, it is apt to break at a foot or more from the shore, and the pieces, still carrying their load of gravel, are shoved up the bank to its top, until, as years roll by, the dike is made too high to receive further additions.

The lake in summer is certain to be stirring with life. Insects upon and over the water, fish, frogs, birds, muskrats, and often large animals are in sight and moving both by day and by night. Now, as the waning sun grew pale behind the birches, no living creature moved. The yellow leaves drifted out upon the breeze, and kept on drifting across the ruffled water. Nothing cared where they drifted. They were dead, and just then all the world seemed full of falling, drifting leaves, with no one to notice them or care for them. Were they to blame for the feeling of sadness which crept over me as the sun went down and the first chill of night came into the air? Or was it the absence of those who might, had they been by the lake, have enjoyed the placid twilight with me? No lights gleamed behind the closed blinds of my home, no fire crackled upon the hearth. Those whom I loved were far away in the city. Leaves were falling in the city, birds had fled from it as well as from the mountains. Chilly night had fallen there too, and with it came, not the sweetness of clear streams and pine groves, but the foul breath of the Charles and of Alewife Brook, open sewers of filthy towns. No, it was not the sadness of the season or the influence of drifting leaves which cast a little shadow over my enjoyment of the exquisite scene before me. It was regret at being alone in its presence and of having to leave it so soon in favor of desk and drudgery.

At ten minutes past five, planets sparkled in the silvery sky, yet a mile away the colors of oaks and poplars still burned their way to me through the clear air. As I walked back to the hotel, I noticed more clearly the number of trees which had lost their leaves. By daylight they were inconspicuous, flanked and backed as they had been by evergreens and trees full of showy color. Now they reared their skeleton arms against the sky, making some parts of the way seem as desolate as in winter. Many of the goldenrods, asters, and immortelles contributed to the wintriness of the scene, for only dry white phantoms of their once cheerful flowers remained upon their stalks. The soft air with only a trace of cold in it belied these signs of winter, and so did the occasional note of a locust. From the little rustic bridge between the large and second lakes, the evening view of the mountains was bewitching. If a hermit thrush could have sung even one phrase of his holy music, I might have felt satisfied; but no bird was there to sing, and only the waves lapping upon the pebbles and the breeze sighing in the pines broke the silence of the starlit night. A leaf came sailing down the lake and passed under the bridge. Its little life as a green leaf was over. It had served the tree which bore it, and now its parched body was given to the stream to be borne away wherever wind and current decided. Was it, then, dead for all time? Ask this of the coal which glows in the grate, the oil which burns in the lamp, or the mayflower whose roots spread through the leaf mould in the forest. Where was this leaf a year ago, or a century ago? As certainly as the parts of this leaf have endured thus far, so certainly will they continue to endure in ages to come. It seems equally sure that if there is a something in me which will not and cannot in time be made into leaves to wither and go down-stream with the wind, then that something will necessarily have as good a chance as the leaf to go down a stream of its own and bring up safely where it can be used again in endless cycles.

The voices of young chickens awoke me next morning, and mingling with their melancholy peeping came the wailing of a northeast wind as it struggled through a window crack. Bed was warm and my watch said it was only six o’clock. I peeped through my blinds and saw that the piazza roof seemed to be shining with rain. Nothing but the momentum of a previous determination to open my shutters led my finger to press the snap and let the wind swing the blind from me; for by the dismal shining of the rain my mind had been completely robbed of any wish to see the sky. The blind slammed against the clapboards and a bewildering sea of color surged across my vision. Instead of a waste of gray mist and dull wet field, I saw six mountains set against a silver sky; and rolling from them towards me, line after line of wave-like wooded ridges and pasture slopes, each more brilliant in coloring than the last. The sunlight was just touching a solitary cloud which floated feather-like above Paugus, and a delicate sea-shell pink suffused it. Some of the same radiance fell upon the granite peak of Chocorua, floated over the highest ridges of spruce-hung Paugus and Passaconaway, warmed the naked shoulder of Whiteface, and touched even the dark head of the Sandwich Dome rising from the Pemigewasset forests. The flanks of these mountains and the whole of Mount Whittier, which rose in the southwest, were violet. A moment before they might have been dark purple, but now the rosy rays of dawn were stealing down them swiftly. I had scarcely time to note the wealth of suppressed color which lay upon the wave-like hills between me and the mountains, or to spring to my north window, fling its blinds wide open, and see the lake so ruffled by the wind and so hidden from the coming dawn as to be only the quicksilver side of the mirror, before the sunlight began creeping down the mountain-sides.

It is a pretty sight in the twilight or darkness to see a rosy edge of flame play along the margin of a sheet of burning paper, slowly devouring it. Some parts of the paper burn more brightly than others, but the whole line of advancing fire is beautiful and animating. So it was with the line of sunlight slowly passing from the rosy crests of the high mountains, downward, with even march across their flanks, their projecting spurs, then the nearer hills, the lake, and river hollow, and finally over the great reach of woods and field nearest to me. In summer nearly the whole of this wide landscape is green or grayish green. In winter it is white, grayish brown, and dark green. Early autumn dots the woods with vivid points of scarlet and gold which stand out sharply from the mass of green; but as the sunlight crept downward over this late October foliage the prevailing color, which glowed forth full of strength, warmth, and meaning, was red,—the red of dregs of wine, of iron rust, of sleek kine, of blood. Intermingled with it were bits of golden or of sulphur yellow, marking birches and poplars, and in the pastures a few maples late in turning blazed with fiery scarlet as their fellows had weeks earlier.

The warmest of the color came from the oaks, but the beeches supported them with generous pigments, and so did the masses of blackberry vines, choke-cherry and huckleberry bushes, and other small shrubs which had turned crimson, red, or madder-brown under the October sun. Sweet-fern bushes, brakes, ferns, pine needles, many of the grasses, and most of the fallen leaves constituting the greater part of the earth’s carpet, answered the sun’s greeting by showing broad expanses of brown, ranging from burnt umber to dark straw color.

Near the lake were many pines, and as the light reached them they seemed to grow higher, broader, nearer, and to shed into the surrounding air something of their steadfastness and strength. They change not, falter not, fail not, come what may to their deciduous neighbors. In this northern land they are a symbol of constancy and faith. No one can look at a pine-tree in winter without knowing that spring will come again in due time. The lake itself soon shared in the flood of color brought out by the sun. Most of its surface was ruffled by the breeze, but at points where the high pines sheltered the water and left it rippleless, the mountain-sides mirrored themselves, and the reflection was red like wine.

As the sun rose higher above the hill behind me, and cast its rays against the west, more and more from above, and less from a level, the colors in the landscape became less vivid, and leafless trees, birch trunks, and softer tints in general, blended with the maroons and browns, toning them down and flattening them, until the prevailing coloring on the mountain slopes became like the bloom on the cheek of a plum; and even the brighter, stronger tints in the nearer view grew softer and dimmer.

After breakfast I climbed the ridge behind the Chocorua House and sought a small beech grove on its crest. In the pasture one of the hawkweeds, two goldenrods, autumn buttercups, yarrow, the red and the white clover were still in bloom, sparingly, of course, and only in warm corners, but still clinging bravely to sunlight and life. Crickets and small green locusts were active and noisy. They frequented hollows in the pasture surface, where beech leaves had blown and lodged among the dry and matted fern fronds. Lying in one of these hollows, which made a warm dry cradle, I watched the locusts hopping from leaf to leaf, crawling along the warm faces of lichen-crusted boulders, and now and then working their bent legs up and down, while their fine, strident music fretted upon my ear. Some were green, some brown, both large and small, some almost buff, tiny, and very agile. They were not the only insects enjoying the sunlight, for spiders, house-flies, now and then a bee, small, gauzy-winged flies, and many a queer and, to me, nameless thing, with nervous antennæ, passed that way by wing or foot. At a spring in the woods where I drank of icy water, countless hosts of springtails or bristletails skipped, in sprightly humor, over the leaves and the surface of the pool. About noon I saw a dragonfly dart past, and later a solitary ant crawl slowly across a patch of sand. No butterflies came to me, yet they were still abundant in Cambridge.

There was no chill in the air which surged over the hilltop. It was soft and caressing, yet so cool that thick clothing or constant exercise was needed to keep warm. Its perfect dryness made it seem less cool than it really was. The sky was wonderfully blue, and it lent its marvelous color to the lake. I have a friend who says that March water is bluer than any other. It certainly carries its blueness straighter into the heart than any other, but as I looked at Chocorua Lake from the hilltop it seemed to me that it could not be any bluer than it was, framed in glossy pines on the one hand, and in golden brown and wine color on the other. The wind was rough with the lake this morning. Striking it suddenly at the far north end, near where my well-loved home stands silent and deserted in the old orchard, it darkened the clear blue into angry flaw-lines and hurried them down the long mile towards the bridge, against which it hurled them in white-capped waves. I laughed as I watched one of the white-edged squalls pass down the length of the lake, for it reminded me of a day in mid-winter when I attempted to cross the lake near its middle, carrying my pet owl “Puffy” perched upon my gun-barrel. A squall came over the white ice, bearing stinging snow-dust in its van; it caught Puffy from his perch and set him down upon the ice with feet helplessly spread, and then as he opened his wings and tail and struggled in the breeze, it spun him southward, sliding and rolling, poor wisp of feathers that he was, until he was landed, more dead than alive, in the woods on the southern shore.

The pines below my breezy hilltop tempted me by their music into their aisles. Under them was spread the new carpet of their needles, dry, warm, and tempting as a couch of eiderdown. The wind sang in their tops, oh so sweetly, and it took me back to the moment in my earliest childhood when I was first conscious of that soft, soothing music. I do not know when it was, nor where it was, nor how young I may have been, but I can recall as from an almost infinite distance the memory of a sudden feeling of happiness at hearing the voice of the pines, and knowing that it was something kind and soothing. If we are in tune with Nature, all her music can find a way into the heart and satisfy something there which yearns for it, and never can be wholly happy without it. The man who trembles at thunder is more to be pitied than the poor Esquimau who was frightened the other day by the crash of orchestral music at a Boston theatre.

While I listened to the pines a chickadee sang his phœbe-note. It was but once, but it told of his happiness as he bustled about in the dark pine wood from which warbler and vireo had departed, and upon which before many days the first snows of winter are to fall. Brave little titmice! they are among the sturdiest of New England’s sons.

In the heart of the pines stands a house. I well remember the gray autumn morning when three of us, on a Thanksgiving holiday, staked out its foundation lines in the thin snow and drifted leaves. We tramped back and forth among the trees, now higher, now lower, then a little to the left, then more to the right. The peak of Chocorua must clear those monster pines; that bunch of low pines must be left low enough to give a free view of the large lake, and finally the young trees rising on the left must not on any account cover the charming glimpse of the third lake with its grove. At last we settled the spot, and drove our first stakes, fingered the long brass tape and drove more stakes. Our hands, ears, and noses were cold, but it was rare sport settling just where that new home should be planted among the singing pines.

To this house, deserted like my own sunny cottage, I took my way. Ascending its steps, I stood within its lofty, granite-walled piazza, as romantic a spot, with its three arched openings facing westward, as a screened loggia overlooking fair Maggiore’s azure waves. High above and out of sight of the road, embowered in the forest, and with the very essence of the exquisite Chocorua landscape framed in its arches, this house might well attract me and draw me, even from the singing pines, to linger the rest of the forenoon above its terraces. Bees and locusts made music in the sunlight, flaming geraniums bloomed at the foot of the castle wall, the perfume of sweet peas still in full flower hung lightly in the air, and upon one of the stone columns of the arches, morning-glories, unharmed by the several frosts which had wrought havoc with other tender plants, turned their filmy blossoms towards the sun. Society with its present habits is to blame for the desertion of such a home as this on such a day as this, when Nature is at her loveliest. Why is it that all New England which has brains, money, or philanthropy thinks the city the one proper sphere for life in all save a few weeks given grudgingly to rest? The cities are too large, too rich in human forces. They are debasing our New England stock, draining away the best of our vitality in their too nervous life. If a third of their population could be sown into the fallow places in the hill country, their own competition would become a less fatal flame, and the country districts, instead of steadily degenerating in physical, moral, and intellectual tone, would again become prolific in healthy men and women.

So far as I know, the word “moor” is not applied to any part of our New England scenery; yet there are dry, comparatively treeless uplands, wind-swept and dotted with bogs which closely resemble English moorland. I climbed to the level of one early in the afternoon and strolled along its rough surface. At the first bit of bog that I struck a wood-frog jumped across the path. He was listless, and made but short leaps. When I followed him he plunged beneath a log which lay in the cold mud. Beyond, on dry ground, a grouse rose noisily from low cover and flew far before going out of sight. As I crossed some stony ground a mouse ran from me and hid between two boulders. Blocking both entrances to his hiding-place with my feet, I tilted one rock away from the other. The mouse darted first towards one of my feet and then towards the other. He dared not cross either, for I kept them moving. So he remained trembling in the middle. He was Hesperomys, the deer mouse, big-eyed and white-footed. I left him unharmed.

Following the edge of my moor, I came to a little glen which cut deeply into its side. A few acres of bog fed a little brook that passed through the glen on its way to the river. The ravine was heavily wooded, mainly with tall and unusually slender beeches. Descending into this grove was like entering the halo which the sunlight of Paris, shining through golden-tinted glass, casts around the tomb of Napoleon in the chapel of the Hôtel des Invalides. The rushing of the wind in the dry leaves filled the glen with sweet, soothing sounds; the sun warmed it and suffused it with radiance; and a deep bed of beech leaves gathered in a hollow offered a couch too tempting to be passed by. Every sense was gratified in this abode of music and color, for a faint perfume came from the leaves, telling of ripening and the fulfillment of nature’s purposes. At ease in the drifted leaves, I watched the tree-tops bending before the gusts. One moment the golden roof of foliage concealed the sky; the next, as every lofty head inclined, wide areas of distant ether appeared, only to vanish again under the rhythmic movement of the trees. The gusts kept the air well filled with falling, fluttering fragments of the golden roof. Hundreds of leaves were often in the air at once, parting company from hundreds of thousands still upon the branches, but going to join legions already on the ground, waiting there the soft tyranny of the snow.

In the midst of the beeches stood a lofty hemlock. The owner of this wood had chosen it for his castle. About thirty feet from the ground at a point where several limbs diverged from the main trunk a nest was securely fixed. Perhaps an inexperienced eye would have taken it for a bird’s nest. It may have been a bird’s nest originally. Now the mass of dead beech leaves heaped upon it and woven into its fabric, making it a conspicuous object from every point of view, proclaimed it to be the home of a gray squirrel. Winds may blow, and rain, hail, and snow fall, but that nest will rest secure against the hemlock’s trunk, under the thatched roof of hemlock branches. Early in September I found a new nest of this kind in a large beech-tree, and upon opening it made a discovery. The compressed green beech leaves gave out a strong, aromatic odor which I at once recognized as one of which I had often obtained whiffs in walking through the beech woods, but which I never had been able to assign to any flower or shrub.

In the lulls between the wind’s gusts I could hear the tinkling of a brook at the bottom of the glen. Peering into the gloom below, where hemlock bushes overshadowed the stream’s bed, I sought for a gleam of water. Not a drop was to be seen. I descended, following the sound of the falling drops, and came to a perpendicular ledge at the upper end of the ravine. There was no mistaking the direction of the music; it came from the face of the rocks and the pile of débris at its bottom. Still not a drop of water could be seen. The falling beech leaves had completely covered brook and fall, pool and rock, but behind their veil the water went on with its singing. It will do the same, brave little rill! when snow covers the leaves and ice forms above and below the snow. The sweet jingling notes will be muffled, but they will be sung all the same.

Of course I drank from the brook, sweeping away the encumbering leaves from the top of the fall to get the water just where it rushed most swiftly. Not to drink from a New Hampshire brook is almost as much of a slight as not to bow to a friend, or not to kiss a little child when she lifts her face for the good-night caress which she thinks all the world is ready and worthy to give to little children. Refreshed, I clambered up the other side of the glen and regained the open moorland, and the glorious, rushing wind. Across the valley the old river terraces stood out as sharply as steps cut in the face of the hill. To have cut those fair outlines there must have been more water flowing out of Chocorua lakes in the olden time than flows from them now. Perhaps in those days Ossipee Lake washed these very terraces.

Coming to another deep cleft in the side of the moor, I hesitated whether to run down one grassy slope, a hundred feet and more, and then up the other slope, or to go round. Precedent decided me to go round. About six feet below the edge of the bank a narrow well-trodden path skirted the ravine, going to its head, crossing at the same level and following along just below the edge of the opposite bank. Sometimes a well-turfed bank in a pasture where food is not abundant will be scored by many paths of this kind, one below another. They are made by the cattle, for a cow never will go down a steep incline if, without too great exertion, she can keep her four feet approximately on a level.

When I gained the southern end of the moor-like ridge, two villages lay before me, one on the left, the other on the right. One was the home of the dead, the other the toiling-ground of the living. They can see each other, and year by year the village on the hill grows larger, and that in the valley grows smaller. When the venerable village postmaster was suddenly turned out of office a few years ago against the public wishes, but in obedience to the infamous “spoils” policy, he was commiserated with for his hard fortune. “Yes,” he said, “it is hard, but I knew it was coming, and bless your soul, the time is near when I shall be turned out of this house too, and told to let some other fellow rotate in and get warm. But, my friend, there is a house of mine up yonder on the hill where politics and money don’t count, and when this world seems unkind I look up there and say to myself, ‘Pretty soon, pretty soon.’”

While waiting for the mail wagon to come down the Ossipee road, over the red bridge and up the hill to the store, I plucked individual leaves from trees and bushes, and marveled over their many ways of changing from pliant green to crackling brown. One of the most brilliant shrubs near the road was a blueberry. Its leaves were crimson, tending towards scarlet, and their surface was as brilliant as satin. The blackberry, which in some lights seemed as bright as the blueberry, was more of a wine color, and it had a duller surface. Some of the viburnum leaves were rich red on their upper faces, but pale below, their mid-vein being pink, and a greenish tone pervading their under surface. Others, shaped like maple leaves, were of a singular color,—a kind of pinkish purple. An oak leaf, plucked from a young bush not many years out of the acorn, was the color of newly-shed blood in its centre, but many small detached areas upon it remained green. From a sucker shoot of a poplar I gathered several strangely effective leaves. One was of sulphur yellow coarsely spotted with black dots; another was blackish brown with crimson veinings above, and clear yellowish white veinings below,—a most unique combination. From an adjoining poplar I picked one uniformly black over three quarters of its area, but blotched with vivid green near its apex. Its veins were yellowish white both above and below. The clusters of lambkill leaves were very pretty. While the upper surfaces of the leaves were faded vermilion or pinkish salmon color, the under sides were buff, or very pale sage green. The willow leaves were queer, damaged looking things, a good deal nibbled by insects and much splashed with dark brown upon a yellowish olive groundwork. A bunch of violet leaves were clear golden yellow, while some of the more delicate ferns were nearly white. Truly the botanists have many pleasant problems before them if they are ever to ascertain why some green leaves turn black, and others brown, orange, yellow, red, purple, or white.

An inspection of the mail led me to walk rapidly back to the Chocorua House and pack my bag for a return journey to the city. As I drove southward the mountains, seen across the pine barrens, were veiled in haze. The wind seemed chiding me for going away so abruptly from this paradise of color. Again and again I looked back at my favorite peaks and forests, printing more and more deeply in my mind the recollection of their noble outlines and remarkable coloring. Finally from the platform of the rear car I saw them over the Bearcamp meadows, and above and beyond them, with its cloud-cap just drifting away to the eastward, Mount Washington, benignantly presiding over the northern sky. Then the train rumbled across the Bearcamp trestle and the shadow of the Ossipee hills fell upon us and deepened into night.