OUR INDIAN SUMMER 



BETWEEN the roaring gales of autumn there is usually some 

 calm interval of exhausted violence when the sun shines 

 bright from a limpid sky, and summer almost seems to have 

 returned. Though most of the summer flowers have vanished, 

 and some of the trees are already bare, the colours of the 

 autumn foliage fill the landscape with redoubled splendour, 

 and make this season the most brilliant of the year. In 

 America this period of calm dry weather after the early 

 autumn storms is longer and more regular than usually in 

 England ; and the oaks and maples in that dry climate burn 

 with a fiercer brilliance than in our own mild air. There 

 this halcyon season is known as the Indian summer, because 

 it was formerly the great hunting-time when the Indians and 

 the settlers who followed them gathered most of their year's 

 harvest of furs and game. The name carries a suggestion 

 both of the forest peoples and of the forest landscapes, which 

 flame into pre-eminence after the cultivated fields are stripped 

 bare ; and it is conveniently used in England for the whole 

 season of late autumn sunshine and brilliant boughs, when 

 the woods are at their richest. 



According to the older reckoning, St. Luke's summer 

 falls in October, and is followed by St. Martin's little summer, 

 when the November sunshine lights up the golden elms. 

 Our autumns are generally broken into alternate periods of 



