BY WINTHROP PACKARD ILLUSTRATED BY CHARLES COPELAND [Image unavailable.] BOSTON SMALL, MAYNARD AND COMPANY PUBLISHERS Copyright, 1910 By Small, Maynard and Company (INCORPORATED) Entered at Stationers’ Hall THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A. The author wishes to express his thanks to the “Boston Transcript” for permission to reprint in this volume matter which was originally contributed to its columns....

T O-DAY the September west winds have begun the fall house-cleaning by sweeping the tops of the pine woods. All the morning the little brown scales which nestle close to the base of each pine leaf as it grows, protecting it from the withering force of the midsummer sun, have been soaring and spinning in high glee, curiously lighting up with brown glimmers the solemn sanctuaries beneath. It is the first prophecy of winter under the sheltering boughs where still lingers the midsummer warmth. The c

T HE seamed and wrinkled face of Katahdin, brown and weather-beaten, looks over twenty-five miles of unbroken forest eastward to “Number One” plantation, through which runs the fine gray line of the Patten road. Southward for miles upon miles, northward for miles upon other miles it stretches, taut and straight as a bowstring, narrow as a creed, and as inexorable. On either side of it, here and there, the hand of man has hewn an open space for a farm. Yet you may stand on the summit of the ridge

O UR weather here in eastern Massachusetts comes from the southwest. Whirling storms, little or big, move up from the Gulf coast and pass on, headed for Spitzbergen by way of Newfoundland. Knowing the habits of these whirling winds, the watchers of the weather bureau are able to say, as a rule quite accurately, when the storm will reach us, from what direction the winds will blow, and what they will bring with them and after them,—rain, gale, or fair weather. One exception to this rule of accura

T HE red squirrel is a good deal like me,—he never can wait for the chestnuts to open. As long ago as early September I used to see him going up and down the trunks of trees neighboring the chestnuts, sputtering and exploding his way along in a jerky unrhythm. He would go up the trunk as a light-weight, motor-skipping runabout goes up a steep hill, trembling all over as he fizzed along with barking explosions. He had his eye on the closed burs, densely set with green spines, and he was angry bec

T HE deep woods catch all the rich colors of the autumn sunsets in their foliage. The dull reds and the vivid ones, the maroons and the scarlets, the golden yellows and the wondrously soft and mellow shades of tan and brown they hold till from a hilltop you see the forest afire. Flames flutter, embers glow and fall, and brown ashes and cinders remain. Yet, if you walk far below the fire, in the forest aisles that are beginning to crisp under foot with the fallen embers of this conflagration, you

T HE summer came back to-day, trailing gossamer garments over the pasture and adding the romance of August to the glamour of the mid-October woods. Where luminous purples hung deep in the shadows of the distance it painted them with a soft gray-blue bloom like that upon the grape. The undulating hills were as soft with it as if they were waves of the sub-tropic reaches of the Gulf Stream, where a wonderful film of purple efflorescence shimmers as far as eye may see. The tan of hickories and the

L AST night the superstitious leaves, forced to part from the home branch and begin a journey on Friday, knocked on wood as they went by, hoping thus to make a change in their luck, for the omens were all bad. The gibbous moon was peering over the eastern wood and they saw it over their left shoulders. Hence in their fall they turned round three times, still for luck! They suspected also that they were being sent off in batches of thirteen and shivered lonesomely all the way to earth, where they

N OVEMBER is Nature’s stock-taking month, when she suspends her labors, stands aloof from her work, and counts up the dozens, noting them all on her list before she carefully puts them into the winter storehouse. To the very last of October her factory is still running, though on part time. By the first of December she has put things away. November is the month in which she counts up the gain or loss and is happy or disconsolate, according to the tally. Why else these wonderful clear days on whi

L AST night the world was all soft with mist. Over on the brow of Cemetery Hill you looked off into an illimitable distance of it. Horizon after horizon loomed over the shoulder of its fellows as the gray-draped hills rose one beyond the other and tiptoed softly away into the yonder world,—so softly that you could not tell where the earth ended and the heavens began. The landscape passed like an elder saint from this world to the next, you could scarce tell when, only that you were awed and soot

A LREADY the robins that piped such a deafening morning chorus all about us last June are swirling in great flocks about the Florida everglades, getting up a Christmas spirit by filling their crops with holly berries and practicing spring songs, and perhaps a little spring love-making in the waxy shadows of the mistletoe bough. But not all of them. Yesterday, at sunset, I heard one that had not joined the innumerable throng. Instead, he lingers to take his Christmas dinner in New England, his ho