OF FALL 



flowering plants for the garden. I have two 

 plants about five years old, which were sent me 

 from a New England hill-side, and each year 

 they send up a dozen or more stalks to a height 

 of six or eight feet. These branch freely, and 

 they are completely covered with rosy-purple 

 flowers from October to the coming of winter. 

 Few plants in the garden attract more atten- 

 tion, and most persons fail to recognize them, 

 so much larger are they in every way than the 

 Aster of the field and pasture. They increase 

 in size each year, but do not spread like the 

 Golden-rod when admitted to the border. But 

 the most delightful Aster of all is the variety 

 Chapmanii, whose flowers seem fashioned from 

 f ringy fragments of the hazy November skies. 

 It is a flower which dreams are born of, a 

 flower that sets one thinking of the " days that 

 are no more," and seems as much a part of 

 autumn as the plaintive cry of the quail in the 

 russet stubble-field or the haze that wraps itself 

 about the hills and fills the valleys with that 

 sense of vagueness and unreality which belongs 

 to no season so much as to late autumn. 



In many portions of the West the lowlands 

 and swamps which have been burned over 

 are literally ablaze during September and Oc- 



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