September Tramps 



the microscope what beauty still! Your 

 painter's leaf would be all coarse blotch and 

 daub. And then imagine what the land- 

 scape is going to be a couple of weeks hence 

 a grand kaleidoscope of sunsets and rain- 

 bows. And this is nature's art-gallery that 

 men abandon in September for the tawdry 

 effects of city "exhibitions !" Nature would 

 have admitted them free, and given them a 

 catalogue, and invited them to an oxygen- 

 party to boot ! 



If you want mountain views, you must 

 choose a cool September morning after a 

 heavy rain. The atmosphere of no other 

 month can be washed so crystal-clean. It 

 has seemed to me often to have a peculiarly 

 magnifying effect, as if all that sparkling 

 gulf of air that lies between you and the dis- 

 tant object were a vast, polished lens, con- 

 caved just right to make for you a cosmical 

 telescope. I shall never forget the joy, the 

 rapture, of some of those September moun- 

 tain-climbs of my boyhood, when, in rugged 

 Vermont, I scaled some familiar peak with 

 my companions, after a night's rain, and be- 

 held, as it seemed to me, all the kingdoms of 

 the earth and their glory spread out before 



