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 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.
To-morrow the wind will be in the northwest again, the morning sun will glint on fields that are hoar with frost, and in the afternoon the Blue Hills will be blue no more, but brown with the rustling tannin of dead scrub oak leaves seen too clearly,--gray with granite angles, and sharply cut against a sky from which all dreams have fled. We had thought the summer too long and too hot, we welcomed the crispness and vigor of autumn, but to-day we walked abroad with joy in the warmth that again thrills us as with a fine touch of youth come back, and as little crinkles of heat shimmer upward from the brown fields we push forward, eager to bathe in it all once more.