Editorial Miscellany. 113 



only seventy-five cents a basket !" so says a stentorian voice at our 

 elbow. The truth, too, we give our honor. Apples, too, with ruddy 

 cheeks, are looking out from barrels that stand in such long rows that we 

 wonder much who'll be customers for them all. Plums are a profusion, 

 too plenty by odds; the very look makes one flatulent. Grapes, in 

 numbers countless, stare you in the face ; we have quite lost our 

 countenance. Leaving the market makes us melancholy ; so we'll 

 just drag in N. P. Willis, lie's a good fellow, in the main ; quite 

 clever at times ; but of late has been taken with a hyperthrophy of spleen. 

 He gossips of nauseous drugs by the yard : if he takes a pill, he quickly 

 sits him down and inflicts its bitterness on fifteen thousand readers, which 

 is the circulation of the Home Journal — so says rumor. Occasionally 

 purging your readers is quite healthful ; a little gall makes them piquant, 

 but too much, and you have acrid visages glaring down. We have got 

 beyond our subject; so we'll just append Mr. Willis's description of a 

 forest in autumn, written before he took to dissertations pharmaceutical : 



AUTUMN. 



The first severe frosts have come, and the miraculous change has 

 passed upon the leaves which is known only in America. The blood-red 

 sugar maple, with a leaf brighter, more refined and delicate than a 

 Circassian lip, stands here and there in the forest, like the Sultan's standard 

 in a host, the solitary and far seen autocrat of the wilderness ; the birch, 

 with its amber leaves — ghosts of the departed summer — turned out along 

 the edges of the woods, like a lining of the purest gold ; the broad 

 sycamore, the fan-like catalpa, flaunted their saffron foliage in the sun, 

 spotted with gold like the wings of the lady-bird ; the kingly oak, with 

 its summit bare, still hid his majestic trunk in a drapery of sumptuous 

 dyes, like a stricken monarch gathering his robes of state about him to 

 die royally in his purple; the tall poplar, with its minaret of silver, 

 stood blanched like a coward in the dying forest, burthening every 

 breeze with its complainings ; the hickory paled through its enduring 

 green ; the bright berries of the mountain ash flushed with a more 

 sanguine glory in the unobstructed sun ; the gaudy tulip-tree, the 

 sybarite of vegetation, stripped of its golden cups, still drank the intoxi- 

 cating light, in leaves than which the lips of Indian skill were never 

 more delicately tinted ; the still deeper-dyed vines of the lavish wilder- 

 ness, perishing with the noble things whose summer they had shared, 

 outshone them in their decline ; and, alone and unsympathizing in this 

 universal decay, stood the fir and hemlock, their frowning heads more 

 sombre and less lovely than ever in contrast with the death-struck glory 

 of their companions. The dull colors of English autumnal fohage give 

 you no conception of this marvelous phenomenon. The change there is 

 gradual ; in America it is the work of a night, of a single frost. Oh, 

 to have seen the sunset hills in the still green and lingering summer, and 



