There is a large crop of moral reflections in my garden, 

 which anybody is at liberty to gather who passes 

 this way/' -CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER. 



OCTOBER 



A LTHOUGH many of these present October days are 

 i f\ sunless, there lies on the floor of the woods a golden 

 sunlight made by the bright fronds of the graceful bracken 

 fern. Besides the harvest of the fruit and several grains, 

 there is this harvest of the bracken, which is of Nature's 

 own gathering, reaped with hands invisible : not with scythe 

 or sickle is the reaping accomplished, but with gentle rains 

 and sparkling frosts, laid low in this manner and garnered 

 into earth's bosom. Very poetic and tenderly suggestive is 

 the harvest of the ruddy bracken. It was indeed a beautiful 

 sight to behold our Springtime woods, when the long stalks 

 of the bracken uprose amid the dead leaves like bishops' 

 crosiers, and when the fronds were fully expanded and woods 

 were like a sea of emerald waves. Tennyson, noticing its 

 height, said even 



" The broad oak of Sumner Chase " 



was 



" Hidden to the knees in fern." 



Some of the many superstitions relating to the bracken 

 are curious. In many of our northern counties an opinion 

 was largely entertained that the burning of the fern brought 

 down rain ; and we read of an English monarch who, having 

 an occasion to pass through Scotland with some chosen friends, 

 sent beforehand strict injunctions that no fern was to be 



burnt. Even to-day, in the highlands and lowlands of Scot- 



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