C 98 ] 

 FALLEN LEAVES 



For beautiful variety no crop can be compared 

 with this. Here is not merely the plain yellow of the 

 grains, but nearly all the colors that we know, the 

 brightest blue not excepted: the early blushing 

 maple, the poison sumach blazing its sins as scarlet, 

 the mulberry ash, the rich chrome yellow of the pop- 

 lars, the brilliant red huckleberry, with which the 

 hills' backs are painted, like those of sheep. The 

 frost touches them, and, with the slightest breath of 

 returning day or jarring of earth's axle, see in what 

 showers they come floating down! The ground is all 

 parti-colored with them. But they still live in the 

 soil, whose fertility and bulk they increase, and in 

 the forests that spring from it. They stoop to rise, 

 to mount higher in coming years, by subtle chem- 

 istry, climbing by the sap in the trees; and the sap- 

 ling's first fruits thus shed, transmuted at last, may 

 adorn its crown, when, in after years, it has become 

 the monarch of the forest. 



It is pleasant to walk over the beds of these fresh, 

 crisp, and rustling leaves. How beautifully they go 

 to their graves ! how gently lay themselves down and 

 turn to mould ! — painted of a thousand hues, and 

 fit to make the beds of us living. So they troop to 

 their last resting-place, light and frisky. They that 

 soared so loftily, how contentedly they return to 

 dust again, and are laid low, resigned to lie and decay 



