“Come nearer.’ Bike riders do not see the country, nor do buggy 
and horseback riders. Be leisurely and walk. Dally, loiter, poke along, 
putter, or, if you like not these words get a word you do like, only let 
the word express delayed and loving motion, the sort of leisureliness a 
brook knows, running when it feels like running, drowsing when it has 
a drowsy mood, in silvern basins where sun and shadows meet, shadows 
to woo to slumber, sun to stoop and kiss the waters awake. So the 
brook loiters. Do you, friend, when and if you would see an autumn 
landscape do the like. Choose your word to fit that motion and fit 
your goings to the word. 
The autumn wind slows to a saunter coming up the long ravine. 
Purple asters (and I have seldom if ever seen them so royal as this 
fall) cluster in flocks of loveliness. Black-eyed Susans had in coyness 
shaded their faces till they looked like buttercups long delayed in 
blooming, months past due, but keeping faith at last. Now and then 
morning-glories, with beauty of leaf and tendril and bell-shaped flower, 
stray and bloom, many of them being so deep a pink as to approach 
the glow of flame. Iron weed stands on its dignity (as usual) unbend- 
ing, as people | have known, with its surly purple. Sumacs were dying, 
but this autumn have the fresh green of spring, so that here is a vivid 
green good for eyes to look upon. Wild grapes hang in purple bunches, 
sometimes in the shadow of their own leaves, rare as arabesques, but 
the grape leaves are turning brown as tired of this long daylight of 
summer and will soon be quit of it. For days past now they 
“Have been half in love with easeful Death, 
Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme.” 
Oaks have, some of them, the dull browns of winter save those glossy 
greens that so well become the: , fairly flashing in the sun when the 
wind tosses them into momentary perturbation like play shields used in 
fairy tournaments. A distance in the background against a hill, sumacs 
stand in clumps, crimson as flushed sunsets. | am a good lover of the 
sumac. In the summer its leaves are so glossy and its fronds so beau- 
tiful, and in late summer its bunches of crimson berries are held on 
high with such loyal pride 
as if they were a lady's 
favor to be worn on 
a knight’s helmet, and 
those berries covered 
