AUTUMN. 95 



sunny cupola or gable peering out among the branches, or a snowy steeple 

 lifting high its golden cross or weather-vane glittering in the sun. The 

 mountain-side is lit up with its autumn glow of intermingled maples, oaks, 

 and beeches, with its changeless ledges of jutting rock, and dense, defiant 

 pines standing like veteran bearded sentinels in perpetual vigilance. 



All this comes to me in a single glimpse beneath the branches. But 

 there are others, where undulating meadows, with their flowing lines of 

 walls and fences, lead the eye through soft gradations to distant purple 

 hills, through thrifty farms, with barns and barracks and rowen fields with 

 browsing cattle, and ruddy buckwheat patches, where the flocks of village 

 pigeons congregate among the cradle marks, in quest of scattered kernels 

 shaken from the sheaves. 



There is a tiny lake near by that nestles among the hill-side farms, 

 where sloping pastures and fields of yellow, rustling corn glide almost to 

 the water's edge. So sensitive and sympathetic is this little sheet of 

 water that I christened it one day Chameleon Lake, for it wears a differ- 

 ent expression for every phase of season or freak of weather, and always 

 dwells in harmony with the landscape which encloses it. In cloudy days 

 it frowns as cold as steel. In clays of sunshine it is as bright and blue as 

 the sky itself, or shimmers like a shield of burnished silver. And now it 

 is a flood of autumn gold, carrying from shore to shore a maze of ripples 

 laden with opaline reflections of intermingled glints from cloud and sky, 

 and of the gold and ruby colored foliage along its banks. 



But this knoll and all these farms are not mine alone. They are 

 such as I should hope might lurk in the memory of almost any one who 

 looks back to early clays among New England hills. 



This old oak-tree, whose furrowed bark I lean upon, was a hardy pa- 

 triarch when first I sought its shade. Its added years have scarcely 

 changed a feature or modified a line in its old-time noble expression. 

 As I look up, its great open arms spread out against the sky exactly as 

 they did when I lolled beneath their shelter and watched the drifting 

 clouds of twenty years ago sail through them in the blue above. Even 

 the jagged furrows in the bark I seem to recognize. Here, too, is that 

 same spreading scale of greenish lichen that fain will grow upon the 

 trunk, as if I had not often picked it all to pieces in my early idling. 

 The same round oak-gall rests on the bed of leaves in the hollow between 

 the rocks near by, as though it had forgotten how a dozen years ago I 

 cracked its polished shell and sent its spongy contents to the winds. 



