CHAPTER XI
(NOVEMBER)
All-cheering plenty, with her flowing horn
Led yellow Autumn, wreathed with nodding corn.
—Burns: "Brigs of Ayr."
There's silence in the harvest field,
And blackness in the mountain glen,
And clouds that will not pass away
From the hill tops for many a day;
And stillness round the homes of men.
—Mary Howitt: "Winter."
THE AUTUMN STORES AND THE LONG WINTER NIGHT
When the caveman was still living from hand to mouth; before he had even got as far as his first crooked stick for a plough, and when Mrs. Cave couldn't have canned a bean or a berry to save her life, even if she had had the cans, a certain little farmer already knew how to get root crops in the Fall and clean them and cut them and put them away in his little barn under the ground for Winter use.
Several of these forehanded folk we have already met—the beaver and the chipmunk, among others—but since we are now at the end of the harvest year I thought we might spend this evening—the last but one, I am sorry to say, that we shall be together—in a little chat about these thrifty brothers of the wild, and how some of them are going to spend the long Winter that begins in the Autumn and lasts until Spring.