T Of His Good Pleasure HE splendour of the hills and plains is wonderful; the trees which a week ago were as green as in June have felt the reinforcement of the rains, which have put into solution the salts of the earth that give to our forests the marvelous hues of the season. Here once more is the magic of transformation,-here once more the unceasing expression of the life which wreaks that lovely magic. Man has in himself incorporate a personality which leaves him at his end a problem and an uncertainty to himself; but if he could meet his seasons as the roses and grasses and trees do, would he not desire and I would he not receive such vicissitudes between spring and spring, through summer and fall and winter, with joy and triumph? Not thus is it with man, that restless spark of the divine within him can have no pauses for recovery and renewal; on it must go, and its best chance for developing advance is by Goethe's motto, "Without haste, without rest." And this other: "For M it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure." Traversing the ways of field and woodland this troubled and worried spirit of man finds now as fine a repose and as keen a delight as it can reach to and sustain. For the wonderful days which have passed over us and which have not yet ended, the common spectacle of ripening earth has filled us with a luxurious comfort that never satiates. The atmosphere of the days of the fall of the leaf and the farewell of the flowers is in itself a delicious gift of heaven,-for heaven is about us not only in our infancy, as Wordsworth wrote, but always, if we resign ourselves to the infant's heart that lives beneath the experiences of the world. Indeed, it is not until we slip into the further side of our human term, until we pass "life's height of water-shedding," that we get the whole value of the heaven which God has given to the soul through which he expresses himself, as through the myriad forms of life besides. The region manifests the extraordinary vitality of Nature when the frosts hold off. There has been but one frost that even touched the trees, and then only in limited areas where moisture advances the assault of lowering temperature. The ferns seldom survive as in this fall, where even the sensitive fern (onoclea sensibilis) may yet oc casionally be found, and the eagle fern,-" hoss brake," the Yankee name is, is quite frequently green and stout. The cinnamon and the clayton ferns are gone by, and so too the ostrich fern, and many another. But now is the bravery shown of the marginal, the spinulose, the Christmas and the crested ferns, the fine sisterhood of the aspidiums, which love to dwell together, knowing their kindred. Now all the lesser shrubs, the viburnums, the cornels, the blueberry family, are thronging the wood paths with exquisite variations of colour, scarlet, crimson, mulberry and tints that have no colour names; while beneath them blanching ferns, and lilac cohosh, and purplish cranesbill, over the fallen leaves, adorn the groundwork of the great scheme. Out in the open fields, by the roadsides and over the highways the maples have filled the common earth with cloth of gold,-a more truly precious gold than that of the commercial medium over which nations fight and men surrender their immortal lives. What words can express the glory of looking up into the royal branches of a sugar maple, catching its golden glow in the reflected. light of the leaves which have ripened and fallen! Indeed, what are words to interpret such magnificence of growth and such splendour of bloom? We can but be quiet, and admire and worship. The persistence and readiness of life is seen in a thousand ways, as we note the way that the small herbs are forming their foot leaves in rich rosets on the ground; the five-finger, the evening primrose, the robin's plantain, the saxifrage, the various asters, the mullein. One never mentions the grasses and the rushes, the flags and the sedges, which are expected and sure,-yet are these not the perennial evidences of continuing impulse and vigour? Note, too, how the plants flower anew under the encouragement of the rains and warm suns,-how the bygone asters and golden-rods and mayweeds start forth with new flowers and even groups of flowers. One may find now pretty nooks in the pastures where there are many dandelions in bloom-dandelions which arise from the seed plants of the spring. The branching yellow violet and the branching white are now occasionally found, and the common blue hooded violet of the meadows. Black-eyed Susan and ox-eye daisy start forth frankly upon the autumn air, sure that they are wanted. The wreath golden-rod is quite a common adornment of the forest paths. Rarely there is a fringed gentian, very rarely. And the fragrances of the forest,--that general woodsy scent which fills all their aisles, the rich bouquet of the fox grapes, the peculiar evanes |