Nature-notes and impressions : in prose and verse / by Madison Cawein [electronic text]

I walked by the golden-tessellated streams of fall; waters, scattered with the slender leaves of the willow, whose currents slowly carry down to stirless pools patens of gold and bronze, arranging them in wonderful mosaics. Here and there along their banks, from a wilderness of blossoming goldenrod, the reddening sumachs thrust up heavy, brick-red plumes of seeds, frosted and glistening with oil; a gipsy carmine, that Autumn employs to stain her cheeks with, here where in the hazy woods

she stands leaning upon a stump whose lower part is ruffed round, like a brown and wrinkled throat, with cream white. fungus. Wheresoever she steps mushrooms and toadstools spring up, and the rotting and sodden roots of decaying trees don fantastic frills, green and gray and orange colored, and the air is filled with the agaric odor of dampness and decay.