186 OCTOBER. 



flowers, we turn our eyes upward and around us, where 

 the woods are glowing like a wilderness of roses, and 

 forget in our ravishment the beautiful things we have 

 lost. As the flowers wither and vanish from our sight, 

 their colors seem to revive in the foliage of the trees, as 

 if each dying blossom had bequeathed its beauty to the 

 forest boughs, that had protected it during the year. The 

 trees are one by one putting aside their vestures of green 

 and slowly assuming their new robes of many hues. 

 From the beginning to the end of the month the land- 

 scape suffers a complete metamorphosis ; and October 

 may be said to represent in the successive changes of its 

 aspect all the floral beauty of spring and summer. 



Unaffected by the late frosts, the grass is still green 

 from the valleys to the hill-tops, and many a flower is 

 still smiling upon us as if there were no winter in the 

 year. Many fair ones still linger in their cheerful but 

 faded bowers, the emblems of contentment, seeming per- 

 fectly happy if they can but greet ' a few beams of sun- 

 shine to temper the frosty gales. In wet places I still 

 behold the lovely neottia with its small white plumes 

 arranged in a spiral line about their stems, and giving 

 out the delicate incense of a lily. The purple gerardia, 

 too, has not yet forsaken us, and the gentians will wait 

 till another month before they wholly leave our borders. 



If we quit the fields we find in the gardens a profu- 

 sion of lovely exotics. Dahlias and fuchsias, and many 

 other plants that were created to embellish other climes, 

 are rewarding the hands that cherished them with their 

 fairest forms and hues. All these are destined, not, like 

 the flowers of our own clime, to live throughout their 

 natural period, and then sink quietly into decay, but to 

 be cut down by frosts in the very summer of their love- 

 liness. Already are their leaves withered and blackened, 

 while the native plants unseared by the frost, grow bright- 



