222 STUDIES IN THE FIELD AND FOREST. 



themes of remembrance for all the rest of their lives. 

 The provident simpler may be seen upon the hills, 

 busily employed in gathering medicinal plants for her 

 own humble dispensary. Close by her side are neatly 

 bound sheaves of thoroughwort, hardback, thousand-root, 

 St. John's wort, pennyroyal, and lifeeverlasting, which 

 she is benevolently providing for the supply of her 

 neighborhood. And while thus employed she feels the 

 reward of the just, in the pleasing contemplation of the 

 good she may perform, when winter comes with its 

 fevers and colds. 



There is no season of the year when the landscape 

 presents so beautiful an appearance, just before sunset, 

 as during this month. The grass has a peculiar vel 

 vety greenness, being without any mixture of downy 

 tassels and panicles of seeds ; for the present covering 

 of the fields is mostly the second growth of vegetation, 

 after the first had been mowed by the husbandman or 

 cropped by the grazing herds. The herbage exhibits 

 little but the leaf, which has been thickened in its 

 growth and made green by the rains of early autumn. 

 When the atmosphere has its usual autumnal clearness, 

 and the sun is just declining, while his rays gleam hori 

 zontally over the fields, the plain exhibits a most bril 

 liant verdure, unlike that of any of the earlier months. 

 When this wide landscape of uniform greenness is 

 viewed in connection with the blue firmament that is 

 spread over our heads, it seems as if the earth and the 

 sky were vying with' one another, in the untarnished 

 loveliness of their appropriate colors. 



There is usually a still serenity during September, 

 almost unknown to any former part of the year ; and 

 all the elements seem to be restored to harmony. Yet 

 this is no season for inaction ; for the temperate 



