Now, however, the rich wine reds, the vivid crimsons, and the deep maroons that deepen on the one leaf into bluish purples and on the other into violet-browns mingled, as they are yet with the vigorous chlorophyl-green of the untinted leaf, these all are beginning to make up the more permanent glory of the full tide of autumn color. Come with me, if you will, at sunset to the scrubby hill where three years ago the woodchoppers swept through like locusts, devouring every green thing that lay in their path.
They left behind them only gray stumps, dead limbs, and devastation. Yet hardly were their backs turned before the surgent vitality of spring swept upward from the earth-sheltered roots and burgeoned from the gray stumps in adventitious shoots that flushed purple with the excess of young blood in them. Four feet they grew, these new shoots, that year, and as much more the next, and now another forest of young oaks, black, white, red, scarlet, and scrub romps where the elder forest stood in majesty. Its leaves are fewer in number, but of enormous size and full of the riot of young life, with all the vigor of the parent tree sent up from the great deep roots.
Now their tide of sap is flowing back and the deep bronze-green is turning to the richest crimson and lake. Through these the golden radiance of the sun is drowned in a sea of bacchanal glory that makes the eye drunk and bewildered with its wine of crimson fires. To look toward it directly is to face a furnace of vivid liquid flames that makes the whole world green with flying blots of complementary color as you look away. Looking north or south to relieve the eye, you find that the rich color is still caught cunningly in the curves and facets of the leaves that glow like fire-rubies set in mosaics of chrysoprase, almandite, garnet, and carnelian. Turn again so that your back is to the sun and your eye rests among soft depths of umber lighted by rich reds that do not dazzle and flanked by tans and beryl. It is a world of glow and warmth and color that will long outlast the scarlets and yellows of the other deciduous trees, and even in the dead of winter the sunset fires will glow and flare in remembrances of these colors in the still-clinging leaves.
THE DAY THAT SUMMER CAME BACK
THE summer came back to-day, trailing gossamer garments over the pasture and adding the romance of August to the glamour of the mid-October woods. Where luminous purples hung deep in the shadows of the distance it painted them with a soft gray-blue bloom like that upon the grape. The undulating hills were as soft with it as if they were waves of the sub-tropic reaches of the Gulf Stream, where a wonderful film of purple efflorescence shimmers as far as eye may see.
The tan of hickories and the tawny yellow of chestnuts seem to break through this haze as the floating gulf weed does off Turk’s Island or among the Bahamas, and when birds lift from the tree tops and sail away, it is as if a school of flying fishes were darting across your steamer’s prow. The softly-breathing southern air is welling up from this mid-ocean river of mysterious romance and floating films of dreams all along our too clear-cut hills.