30 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES 



But that note is not exaggerated. It is an accurate 

 transcription. Many years ago I read somewhere a 

 statement by Maxfield Parrish that the colour scheme of 

 New England could be as vivid as that of Arizona, but it 

 was not till I had dwelt a Winter through amid the New 

 England hills that I believed him. Mount Lafayette 

 sometimes is a mighty amethyst in the August sunset, 

 but even our humble Berkshires are amethysts evening 

 after evening when the valleys are deep in snow and the 

 wooded slopes are gray with chestnuts and birches 

 streaked on the winter carpet; they are a beautiful chain 

 of amethysts binding the farms, the villages, the river 

 reaches, and at their feet at twilight into the rusty tama- 

 rack swamp steals a purple veil, which mounts the 

 eastern wall as the sun sinks behind the western, dusk- 

 ing into blue before it creeps quite to the summit, and 

 changing from blue to an elusive, shadowy gunmetal 

 colour as the evening comes and a silver moon rides high. 



There are sometimes colours in the later snowstorms, 

 too. It may be, of course, merely a coincidence, but 

 within my observation these coloured snowstorms 

 have all occurred after the February thaws, when the 

 mind has begun to prepare itself for Spring. The in- 

 creased power of the sun and the higher tempera- 

 ture are, in fact, responsible for the atmospheric effects 

 which produce the colour. It can come from nothing 

 else, for the earth is as bare and brown as in December; 

 there is no more colour on the hills, no brighter hue on 



