OCTOBER 



Downfall of the Year 



BY full daylight the dress of early autumn will 

 not always stand much looking into. It is 

 hard at times to hide from ourselves that 

 fields and roadside hedges, to a less extent woods, 

 are full of spoilt form and colour at the close of 

 September. The hedges, against which the spent 

 brome-grasses rear themselves, have begun to show 

 the nests of summer warblers and finches which 

 foiled the searcher in the thick of June. The 

 most closely felted and finished nests of all, wrens' 

 or chaffinches', in which there was not a scrap 

 of moss or a feather awry, are by now in ruin. 

 It is lost so soon, that exquisite contour of a bird's 

 nest, once the builder has ceased to press and 

 smooth the perfect bowl with her breast. So the 

 birds' nests which the hedges are discovering are 

 little heaps of rubbish, with no sign of art or 

 beauty. 



When the sun shines, and the sky is blue and 

 white, we do not notice the prevailing shabbiness of 

 leaves and stems blackening cloverheads, brown- 

 seeded dock, tow-coloured copse grasses. It is in 

 240 



