October Vagabonds

E-text prepared by Brendan Lane, Mary Meehan, and the Project Gutenberg
Online Distributed Proofreading Team
1911
I The Epitaph of Summer II At Evening I Came to the Wood III Trespassers will be … IV Salad and Moonshine V The Green Friend VI In the Wake of Summer VII Maps and Farewells VIII The American Bluebird and Its Song IX Dutch Hollow X Where They Sing from Morning Till Night XI Apple-Land XII Orchards and a Line from Virgil XIII Fellow Wayfarers XIV The Old Lady of the Walnuts and Others XV The Man at Dansville XVI In which we Catch up with Summer XVII Containing Valuable Statistics XVIII A Dithyrambus of Buttermilk XIX A Growl about American Country Hotels XX Onions, Pigs and Hickory-nuts XXI October Roses and a Young Girl's Face XXII Concerning the Popular Taste in Scenery and some Happy People XXIII The Susquehanna XXIV And Unexpectedly the Last
Envoi
As I started out from the farm with a basket of potatoes, for our supper in the shack half a mile up the hillside, where we had made our Summer camp, my eye fell on a notice affixed to a gate-post, and, as I read it, my heart sank—sank as the sun was sinking yonder with wistful glory behind the purple ridge. I tore the paper from the gate-post and put it in my pocket with a sigh.
It is true, then, I said to myself. We have got to admit it. I must show this to Colin.
Then I continued my way across the empty, close-gleaned corn-field, across the railway track, and, plunging into the orchard on the other side, where here and there among the trees the torrents of apples were being already caught in boxes by the thrifty husbandman, began to breast the hill intersected with thickly wooded watercourses.
High up somewhere amid the cloud of beeches and buttonwood trees, our log cabin lay hid, in a gully made by the little stream that filled our pails with a silver trickle over a staircase of shelving rock, and up there Colin was already busy with his skilled French cookery, preparing our evening meal. The woods still made a pompous show of leaves, but I knew it to be a hollow sham, a mask of foliage soon to be stripped off by equinoctial fury, a precarious stage-setting, ready to be blown down at the first gusts from the north. A forlorn bird here and there made a thin piping, as it flitted homelessly amid the bleached long grasses, and the frail silk of the milkweed pods came floating along ghostlike on the evening breeze.