The swamp glowed like a Turkey carpet. The cranberry vines and huckleberry bushes were pure crimson, the black alder berries scarlet, and the ferns burnt-orange. Just beyond us, in the velvet of the swamp, was a pond, across which the wind ruffled; living blue, with tawny rushes around it.
As we came back, a hunter, in a leather jacket, with his gun on his shoulder and partridges hanging out of his pockets, stepped out of the woods on the path just ahead of us. This was old Mrs. Penny’s son Jason. The open season had not begun yet, but the farm looked a hard place for a living, and we saw no need of telling, in town, that the Penny family had partridge for supper.
We had a long quiet drive home. It had been so extraordinarily warm, all through early September, that we saw a fine second crop of hay being got in, in a low-lying meadow bordered by thick woods, part of which must have been an old lake-bottom. The grass was heavy, and a good many fresh haycocks were made and standing already, as if in July. The solitary mower rested on his scythe to watch us, and then went on, though the dusk was fast deepening.
We stopped when we came to Height of Land, to look out over the painted woods. They flamed round us to the horizon.
Later the moon rose, in the half-blue, half-dusk, and presently shone on a white mist-lake, over the low land through which we were then passing. The mist was rising, and wreathing the colored woods with white. Next came two more hills, and then another mist-lake in the moonlight.
By October of this year the fires of September had sunk to a rich smouldering glow. The rolling woods, as far as the eye could see, were masses of dusky gold and wine-color. There was actual smoke, too, pale blue in the hollows, from many forest fires.
Nearly all of October was Indian Summer. Every day there was a soft golden haze, just veiling the yellow of the woods, and the days were warm and still, like midsummer, but with a kind of mellow peacefulness.
We spent a whole day out on Watson’s Hill, watching the distant smoke of forest fires, and listening to the different Autumn sounds, the ring of axes from the wooded part of the hill, an occasional shot, the tapping of woodpeckers, and the friendly chirruping of chickadees and juncos. The bare hill-top was steeped in sunshine. The checkerberries and beechnuts were just ripe, and very good. We built our fire on a flat-topped, lichened rock, and found water to drink in a little tarn among the russet and tawny ferns and cotton-grasses, fed by a spring which stirred and dimpled the surface.