The sun hid himself behind the clouds and did not appear for many days.
It began to rain. The wind quickened its pace: it dashed the rain over the meadow, whipped the river into foam and whistled through the trunks in the forest.
“Now the song is finished!” said the Prince of Autumn.
Then he put his horn to his mouth and blew.
Autumn’s horn blew a lusty chime, For the last time, for the last time! Ways close when need is sorest: Land-birds, fly clear! Plunge, frogs, in mere! Bee, lock your lair! Take shelter, bear! Fall, last leaf in the forest!
And then it was over.
The birds flew from the land in flocks. The starling and the lapwing, the thrush and the blackbird all migrated to the south.
Every morning before the sun rose the wind tore through the forest, and pulled the last leaves off the trees. Every day the wind blew stronger, snapped great branches, swept the withered leaves together into heaps, scattered them again and, at last, laid them like a soft, thick carpet over the whole floor of the forest.
The hedgehog crawled so far into a hole under a heap of stones that he remained caught between two of them and could move neither forwards nor backwards. The sparrow took lodgings in a deserted swallow’s nest; the frogs went to the bottom of the pond for good, settled in the mud, with the tips of their noses up in the water and prepared for whatever might come.
The Prince of Autumn stood and gazed over the land to see if it was bare and waste so that Winter’s storms might come buffeting at will and the snow lie wherever it pleased.