33. Cup form hoar frost
The little sour fox-grapes which grow in the hedge-rows, are now piquant in flavour, and have acquired something which they lacked before, and are pleasant to the taste since the hoar frost’s visit to them. The bitter-sweet berries which grow close beside them, tangled and twisted with the gray, fluffed-out clematis plumes, have burst their orange-coloured sheaths, and gleam more vividly than before. And the great green chestnut burs are bursting, just a trifle; they need one more, slightly sharper touch from the hoar frost, and then the plump, brown, satin-skinned nuts will come tumbling out of their burs to the ground. The eager squirrels have already begun to collect their winter supplies. They are early at work, even before the magical display created by the hoar frost has been touched by the sun. They mean to get ahead of the children in their nut gathering, if possible.
If you too, would rise with the squirrels, and go forth into the open fields and woods, you will be amply repaid for the small effort which it cost you, for the display which the delicate hoar frost makes upon a clear morning in early autumn, when first touched by the sunrise, is really fantastic and wonderfully beautiful.
If you happen to be in the country, direct your steps across the pasture lands, where the short thick grass is powdered heavily with the hoar frost, and do not fail to pause at the old, gray rail fence, leading into the cornfield, to study the fine effects, the magic work which the Frost Spirit has left there during the night. The withered brown shocks of corn, standing in suggestive, witch-like attitudes, scattered over the fields, each lance-like rustling blade tipped with a steely, glittering coat of frost; while between the leaning stacks gleam great golden pumpkins, as yet unharvested, each golden sphere gleaming through a bluish-white deposit of hoar frost, or frozen dew.
34a. Columnar hoar-frost crystals
34b. Columnar hoar frost (tabular)
Unquestionably, James Whitcomb Riley had in mind a similar scene when he was inspired to pen the homely lines so often quoted:
“When the frost is on the punkin,