flowers, before earth is ripe for this miraculous

charm.

That one wonderful day revealed the ideal type of the exceptional season. Seldom in a lifetime may one hope to see and to feel that wondrous dream of air and light and exquisite illusion. To one who viewed the earth from a mountain peak, all fields and forests, streams and ponds, blended in phantasmagoria. There may be azure hazes veiling and masking the landscape at many seasons: in early April when the snows are melting; in June when summer grows sensuous; in August when the heat settles, gray and intimate, on the bosom of earth, and all the garniture of Nature is suffused with fervent sunlight; in September when the leaves put on colour and the winds are whist; in October when all the woods are glorious and the delicate blue tinge sets off the glowing tones of trees and shrubs and dying ferns. But such a transforming skyey hue as charges the Indian Summer landscape is so different from all other azures of the advancing year that no one who has viewed the scene under such a light can be misled.

On that rarest of days the earth lay in peace and transcendent slumber. The light western breeze scarcely stirred the pine leaves high up in the ether. The hemlocks were whispering softly

as the sough of the zephyr disturbed them, and out from the witch hazel covert the grouse now and then dashed whirring. Over the broad farms lightly there brooded the sense of contentment, and the forests sighed gently as through them the breezes caressingly wandered. All the broad earth seemed transmuted to a region of dreaming enchantment, as if at a breath it might vanish, as if all that was seen was but Maya; the sun in its shining subdued, the vault of the high skyey spaces, no less than the sinuous river that gleamed white far into the cloud-bank of vapours that clung close to earth and shut in the common horizon, or the hills that were lost as they rose in the veil of the magical distance.

For this day indeed all the autumn had ingenuously been preparing, with frosts in this latitude delayed so that every tree in the forest has had its full opportunity to blossom at its best, and so splendid masses of orange and gold and pale lemon in the sugar orchards, of brightest red in soft maples, so rich ranges of brown in elms, beeches and chestnuts, the hickories' gamboge yellow, the sumachs' scarlets and crimsons, the glowing viburnums and cornels, mingled and qualified by the heart-reds and maroons of oaks along the mountain sides, have seldom been surpassed. Even the apple trees, whose foliage usu

ally withers to dull brown in early frosts, have had time enough to grow interesting in shining mottled hues of bronze, and the Japanese ampelopsis that in the city adorns so many churches and houses has shown all its striking variegations of colour, which are more like those of the poison ivy than the simple pure colours of the woodbine, our native ampelopsis, whose season is so much briefer, though not less conspicuous. The eye has been nobly feasted by the procession of Nature's glory over hills and meadows and pastures and along country roads. There is yet the harmony, the poetry of earth, which Keats said is never dead; the insect musicians are not silenced utterly, as usually the killing touch of frost has silenced them ere this ; still on sunny mid-days the cricket's chirp and the grasshopper's dry fiddling may be heard; and wasps, hornets and bumblebees dash about in counterfeit of summer. The hawks sail and scream over the hills; the crows caw lustily,-as they will do in their customary visits all winter long; even yet there are a few jolly song sparrows singing for pure love of it. Gentians yet "look through their fringes to the sky;" nor yet has every aster or golden-rod extinguished its cheerful rays. The pulse of the life of God beats warmly in these latter days, as in the days of beginning. It may indeed be felt that in one Indian Sum

mer day, we have had an earnest of the truth that in the transient show of earth lives the constant substance of the divine spirit, in which death that seems is but a phase of life that is.

T

Indian Summer Reverie

HE rare season of the year is passing away. Gathering clouds forebode the end of these Indian summer days, so perfect in tranquil peace, the pause of Nature ere the finishing frosts. The peculiar charm of earth at this moment is a profound and serious sweetness. Repose broods over the valleys and veils the forests; the hills melt into the melting sky; high the vapours of the fallen foliage mount in the atmosphere; sounds echo far yet soft across the land; the very caw of the crow loses its harsh emphasis, and the bluejay's screams are in minor keys. Now the chickadee's calls and the slight whispers of the mountain sparrows are the chief voices of the woodland and the copse; the visiting snow-buntings lift their gleams of white as they fly from bush to bush; and over the marshes, what is that swift vision of broad blue wings but the blue heron, pausing in the journey of the year? The red squirrels chatter and scold, the chipmunks skurry through the rustling leaves, and the grouse