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

October, 28th, 1903. Autumn is with us. She who endears herself to us through her decay. Again the sober brown carpet of the leaves rustles on the forest floors. Once more, here in Kentucky, the long bronze-green blurs and streaks, stealthily serpentine, of the duckweed marble the sluggish streams and pools with copperas hues, making of each a huge moss-agate, under the clear lemon and burnt brown of the beeches. Again the huckleberry bushes seem turned into garnet and ruby, their leaves, colored with carmine and vermilion, cover each bush, making it burn like that from which God addressed Moses.

Again the moss, crisp, dry and gray, starred here and there with plushy green, makes mute the step. Again the acorns sow the way, falling continually, and crunching and crackling under the feet, along with the burrs of the beech and chestnut now emptied of their nuts. Again the oleander-colored skies of sunset, seen through the columned iron of the oaks, invite the soul to wander and lose itself in the forest of dreams and shadows. The blue-winged wasp and the yellow-winged grasshopper seem aweary of their own singing. The bush-clover, tired of its papilionaceous, pink blossoms, is converting them rapidly into links of flat green burrs that loosen and cling to all that touches them. Burr-marigolds besiege the woodland ways, bristling an army of brown burrheads, dishevelled spikes of forked thorns. Flame-flecked leaves, or

leaves stained with blood-red fire, flutter and fall around us, heaping the path that leads to the leaf-clogged stream, reflecting all the sorrow and savagery of the year, the cinnabar of the burning-bush, the scarlet of the sumachs,— already half-stripped of their leaves,—and the crimson and gold of the maples. Now and then one catches the pungent, alkali odor, so characteristic of autumn, of burning wood and weeds; and in the twilight, dotting it like the eyes of some forest animal, the distant smoulder or flare of a brush-fire. And then at night—with what a feeling of awe we walk the autumn woods! What wonders, what whispers walk with us! Death and Melancholy and Decay, mysterious and invisible companions of the rain and the wind, seem never weary of telling us of the sorrow, the sadness of existence, complaining ceaselessly to the sighing and weeping

trees and the unhappy and dying flowers.