Let Us Say," He is Beautiful"

L

ET us call it the line storm. It is true that the autumnal equinox was three weeks past when it began, but why should we closely hug the letter when by freeing the spirit we can count three weeks as nothing in comparison with that attractive tradition? It surely seems reasonable that the sun, when it goes wintering down South, should have more distinction than the English gentry who go to the Riviera or the happy American who changes to Florida or Bermuda,—his stay being longer and his importance greater. So while a paragraph in the gossip column will do for the one, a good, steady, oldfashioned coast storm is much more appropriate at the southing of the sun. The old rule was always elastic, the 22d, "there or thereabouts," -and three weeks later is thereabouts. We have a scriptural warrant for the early and "the latter rains."

The line storm was of rare beauty and considerateness. It was one of those slow, deliberate

gatherings of cloud and fog and mist,-fog sweeping in along the coast and hiding the sea from the shore, mists rising from the streams and the marshes, dry as they seemed, farther inland; a day of lowering clouds, low descending on the hillsides, veiling the view of the earth from the mountains, full of gray clinging vapours and dripping trees and a mysterious consciousness of change; then a day of showers and of sunlight breaking through the clouds now and again, settling into quiet rains, with an occasional burst of a cloud in swift descent all at once, which filled a night and a day and a night again; then in the "wee sma' hours 'ayont the twal" the morning star hanging as a sign in the thinning clouds, which letting fall their gentle burthen melted away and dispersed, until the auroral glory began, and the sun shone on a renewed earth, and the west wind arose with the sun and tossed the patient and refreshed trees, strewing with leaves the woodland and the city streets, and the line storm was over. It is one of the most admirable events of New England meteorology, and old folks say that this used to be a regular thing until the weather bureau was constituted to cold-shoulder dear tradition, and relegate the equinoctial to the realm of fable. No such thing! Is there anything fabulous about the four-days' storm that began on Sunday? We trow

not. It fulfilled all the conditions. Let it be accepted at its full value.

With or without the richer and broader glories, the season holds a multitudinous magic for the lover of Nature in her infinitely varied manifests. It is in such a season that one realizes most completely the ceaseless movement of conscious life, expressing itself in myriad forms. While the birds are fewer, and now the lesser creatures of the forest, the snakes and salamanders, and the crickets and grasshoppers and locusts in the fields, are almost all retired, the life that speaks in plants is as busy as ever.

On a barren hillside, as almost anybody would call it, there is room for inexhaustible study and admiration,-yes, and adoration, for where is God to be worshiped, where is his essence to be known, where is the unbeginning and unending life to be discerned, more than in these bright and happy spontaneities of scores of humble plants, over which hundreds may walk oblivious of their presence? In a few hours' ramble on such barren hillsides, among the grasses,-every one of the many species and varieties a marvel in itself, one finds the pretty Deptford pink, a charming little relation to the carnations which man has developed, but quite unacquainted with them. It is so modest that one is amazed to see

how its clear pink lightens up and cheers the spot where it blooms. Then one finds a buttercup, or a tender little " Quaker Lady," or if no flower appears, then note how robin's plantain or saxifrage or St. John's wort is spreading its roset for next year's growth; or how the sumptuous silver-dewed velvet aquamarina of the heart of the mullein makes a spot of infinite wealth at the edge of the ledge, or how the young plants of the columbine, which will have bloom next May, are turning into charm with lilac and purple colours, as well as with their most graceful and delicate leaves, so finely wrought in sinuated arcs of beauty.

Now and again one comes on on a group, a community rather, of the wild rose, and with blossoms here and there as lovely as those of June. In another community we shall see the little royal purple laurel, the sheep laurel, blooming as if its time were not four months past. These are of course sports," accidents of the rare autumnal heats; and there is yet one more notable, the pillared mullein amid its brown seedvessels strikes out a new sweet yellow flower for the bees to seek, and at its top sends forth a new essay at greater height in a sprout as fresh and green and full of bloom as it were just beginning its destiny of fruit. Furthermore, one finds the

great plant of the Indian poke with its ruddy stalks and great green leaves whose borders are growing red, and its berries in panicles of most royally dark crimson, while still the pink-white blossoms persist in coming out at the ends of the

stems.

Of course the juniper and the cedar are blue with their masked cones, and the silvery lights amid their greens add an elusive grace to the charm, while over the fences and up the cedars climbs the bittersweet, with its pendants of orange berries, whose yellow envelopes have fallen back to display them. The poison sumach is now most splendid, and its drooping stems of whitish berries add to its effect. Now and then, too, one may hap to see by a rill side the unrivaled cardinal flower, and a colony of fringed gentians, the most exquisite of fall flowers, and the most capricious. Then, most characteristic of all of the season, there steals upon the nostrils the wild magic of the witch hazel's fragrance, so slight, so subtle, so penetrating, so spiritual, that nothing else in the odours of field and forest can be compared with it.

What are all these, and the grasses, the mosses, the lycopodiums, the lichens, the very moulds on the rocks, but the expression in infinite variousness of the one constant Spirit that pauses not