A
utumn comes early in Grassy Fordshire. In late September the nights are chill and a white mist hovers ghostly in the moonlight among our hills. The sun dispels it and warms our noons to a summer fervor, but there is no permanence any longer in heat or cold, or leaf or flower—all is change and passing and premonition, so that the singing poet in you must turn philosopher and hush his voice, seeing about him the last sad rites of those little lives once blithe and green as his own was in the spring.
Ere October comes there are crimson stains upon the woodlands. "God's plums, father!" Robin cried, standing as a little boy on Sun Dial and pointing to the distant hills. A spell is over them, a purple and enchanted sleep, though all about them the winds are wakeful, and the sumac fire which blazed up crimson in the sun but a moment gone, burns low in the shadow of white clouds scudding before the gale. Here beneath them the bloom of the golden-rod is upon the land; fieldsful and lanesful, it bars your way, or brushes your shoulders as you pass. Only the asters, white and purple and all hues between, vie here and there with the mightier host, but its yellow plumes nod triumph on every crest, banks and hedgerows glow with its soldiery, it beards the forest, and even where the plough has passed posts its tall sentries at the furrow's brim.
In the lower meadows there is still a coverlet of summer green, but half hidden in the taller, rusting grasses, whose feathery tops ripple in the faintest wind, till suddenly it rises and whips them into waves, now ruddy, now flashing silver, while a foam of daisies beats against the gray stone hedges like waters tumbling on a quay.
There is cheerful fiddling in these dying grasses, and crickets scuttle from beneath your feet; there is other music too—a shrill snoring as of elder fairies oversleeping; startled insects leap upon you, flocks of sparrows flee from interrupted feasts, squirrels berate you, crows spread horrid tales of murder stalking in the fields.
Then leave the uplands—tripping on its hidden creepers; part the briers of the farthest hedgerow, and descend. Down in the valley there is a smell of apples in the air, pumpkins glow among the wigwams of the Indian-corn, and deeper still runs Troublesome among the willows, shining silver in the waning sun. There in the sopping lowlands they are harvesting the last marsh hay. A road leads townward, the vines scarlet on its tumbling walls; the air grows cooler—
"Oh, it is beautiful!" says Letitia, sadly—"but it is fall."
I observe in her always at this season an unusual quietness. She is in the garden as early as in the summer-time, and while it is still dripping with heavy dew, for she clings tenderly to its last flowers—to her nasturtiums, to the morning-glories on the trellis, and the geraniums and dahlias and phlox and verbenas along the path; but she gives her heart to her petunias, and because, she says, they are a homely, old-fashioned flower, whom no one loves any more. As she caresses them, brushing the drops from their plain, sweet faces, she seems, like them, to belong to some by-gone, simpler time. Some think her an odd, quaint figure in her sober gown, but they never knew the girl Letitia, or they would see her still, even in this elder woman with the snow-white hair.
Every fall gypsies camp in the fields near Troublesome on their way southward. It is the same band, Letitia tells me, that has stopped there year after year, and Letitia knows: she used to visit them when she was younger and still had a fortune to be told. It was a weakness we had not suspected. She had never acknowledged a belief in omens or horoscopes, or prophecies by palms or dreams, though she used to say fairies were far more likely than people thought. She had seen glades, she told us, lawn or meadow among encircling trees, where, long after sundown, the daylight lingered in a fairy gloaming; and there, she said, when the fire-flies danced, she had caught such glimpses of that elf-land dear to childhood, she had come to believe in it again. There was such a spot among our maples, and from the steps where we used to sit, we would watch the afterglow pale there to the starlit dusk, or that golden glory of the rising moon break upon the shadowy world, crowning the tree-tops and quenching the eastern stars. Then, sometimes, Dove and Letitia would talk of oracles and divination and other strange inexplicable things which they had heard of, or had known themselves; but Letitia never spoke of the gypsy band till three giggling village maids, half-fearful and half-ashamed of their stealthy quest, found their school-mistress among the vans! She flushed, I suppose, and made the best of a curious matter, for she said, simply, when we charged her with the story that had spread abroad:
"They are English gypsies, and wanderers like the Primroses from their ancient home. That is why they fascinate me, I suppose."