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sombre grove. Spring has lured us with her promise, summer 

 has yielded us her treasures, both seasons have preached to us 

 their sermons ; Michaelmas has come and gone and with it the 

 Indian Summer, that meditative, pungent week which seems to 

 call us, becoming articulate again as *' the dead summer's soul.'* 

 To some, the windy days, the falling leaves, the grey 

 hoar-frost on the grasses of an early morning, make a picture 

 of sadness and desolation, as when Bryant writes 



" The melancholy days are come, the saddest of the year, 

 Of wailing winds and naked woods, and meadows, brown and 



^^^ But for me, I can never look at a whirl of falling leaves 

 chasing each other in a mad scramble across the lawn that 

 they do not seem to me messengers come straight from Comus 

 the little god of laughter. Every separate leaf hurries along 

 with his mind on his work, each apparently bearing some side- 

 splitting joke which he is in duty bound to deliver with the 

 utmost speed to some solemn and unappreciative human 

 just around the comer. I quite agree with Peter Pan's 

 biographer when he asserts that "there is almost nothing 

 that has such a keen sense of fim as a fallen leaf." See them 

 over there playing hury my leader in that comer by the fence. 

 Don't you see, the game is to keep the big fellows pinned into 

 a wind-trap while the little coves go flying along outside 

 and deliver their messages first. If you watch them you will 

 see that they are ever so much more adroit at playing last 

 tag and prisoner's base than ever you were. They never 



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