The Bay of the Band 
Pie is not the only thing one brings in with his winter 
squashes. He stores the ripe September in their 
wrinkled rinds, rinds that are ridged and bossy with 
the summer’s gold. 
To dig one’s own potatoes! to shock one’s own 
corn! to pick one’s own apples! to pile one’s own 
squashes at one’s own barn! It is like filling one’s 
system with an antitoxin before going into a fever- 
plagued country. One is immune to winter after this, 
provided he stays to bake his apples in his own wood 
fire. One works himself into a glow with all this 
digging, and picking, and piling that lasts until 
warm weather comes again; and along with this har- 
vest glow comes stealing over him the after-harvest 
peace. It is the serenity of Indian summer, the mood 
of the after-harvest season, upon him,— upon him 
and his fields and woods. 
The stores are all in: the acorns have ripened and 
lie hidden where the squirrels will forget some of 
them, but where none of the forgotten will forget to 
grow; the winged seeds of the asters have drifted 
down the highways, over the hillsides and meadows; 
the birds are gone; the muskrats’ lodge is all but 
finished ; the hickories and the leaf-hid hepaticas are 
38 
