AUTUMN 13 



the game when the season is coming to a close. The activity 

 of the worms helps, perhaps, to give the air that suggestive 

 scent which belongs to this season of all seasons. But for 

 the most part the scents of autumn belong to the mists which 

 cover the land like the spirit of sleep before the midday 

 awakening. These mists are integral to British autumns. 

 England has been compared to Newfoundland. In that 

 strange land autumn is not un-English, but the air is singularly 

 bright and clear, even early in the autumn mornings, and you 

 miss these subtle perfumes and breaking glories of the mists 

 that ' half reveal and half conceal ' this England, ' this swan's 

 nest in an ocean. 1 



We must in some measure follow the world and the 

 poets in regarding autumn as a time of loss and decay. It is 

 true that 



' The woods decay, the woods decay and fall, 

 The vapours weep their burden to the ground ' ; 



but it is also true that a new vigour dispels the languor of 

 sated summer. Their second gush of energy comes over 

 many birds. Tiny birds like the golden-crested wren, and 

 weak flyers like the corncrake, are possessed as at no other 

 season save spring with that energy of motion which urges 

 them to flights many thousand times more exacting than their 

 normal strength could endure ; and for autumn needs some 

 of the birds take on new feathers. The cock chaffinches 

 shine out in colours as gorgeous as their spring robes, for 

 they moult twice in the year, in autumn and in spring. 

 Nearly all birds begin to fatten ; they store up a reserve of 

 fat and heat, the universal accompaniment of energy, against 

 the demands of a barren winter. And autumn is a season 

 of breeding. The bees take their marriage flight. The 

 queen wasp, made fertile, takes her last outing before quench- 

 ing her energy in winter sleep. The moth lays her eggs 



