LITTLE DUES OF CORN 



IN the close, hazy days of early autumn, when the 

 morning sun glistens mildly on hedges netted with 

 dewy gossamer, and the grass is damp till noon, a 

 kind of soft, contented, half-melancholy joyfulness 

 seems to get into the very air. The earth is at rest 

 after her annual labour, and from her teeming basket 

 pours forth food to her children, and a lazy, idle happi- 

 ness is announced by the very rooks as they leisurely 

 flap from the meadow to the potato-field or caw to 

 one Another on ash or elm. Trees in the quiet air 

 stand sleepy and still as in a trance, all wrapped in 

 long brown cloaks that daily grow more yellow, and 

 a few are splendid in a jewellery of red berries. Wild 

 plantations are almost impossible to traverse, for 

 luxuriant vegetation is at its height nettles and 

 burdocks, brambles and wild briars, creepers and 

 climbers, all the dense undergrowth of the wood, 

 have raised their stems and hung their tendrils every- 

 where ; and only an almost imperceptible fading, a 

 slight blanching of the green, tells that Nature has 

 spoken her ' Thus far and no farther ' to them. 

 Already the sharp morning frosts are arresting the 

 flow of their sap. Some of them will die like the 

 insects thoughtlessly fluttering about them, and be 

 replaced by sproutings from the grains of seed that 

 bird or wind has borne from place to place ; some, 



