And now let us put on our seven-league boots and walk from September's green and brown, through October's gold and crimson, into that season of the year 1906 when Nature is shifting her scenery, making ready for the great spring show. It is bleak, but not cold; barren, but not ugly,--for the stage setting of the hills and woods and streams, even without the coloured wings and flies and the painted trees and grass, has its fine simplicity of form and grouping that are good to look upon. Observe in the picture a small man sitting on a log in a wood, looking at the stencil work of the brown and gray branches, as its shadows waver and shimmer upon the gray earth. He is poking reflectively in the earth with his cane. His boat is tied to some tree roots, and he doesn't breathe as regularly as a man should breathe who is merely thinking of his next dinner or his last dollar. He delves into himself and almost forgets to breathe at all, so deep is his abstraction. And so he sits for five minutes--ten minutes--half an hour--and save that he edges into the sun as the shadow of the great walnut tree above catches him, an hour passes and he does not move. Poking, poking, poking his stick into the mould, he has dug up much litter in an hour, and he has seen his whole life thrown up before him. In those leaves yonder is a battle--a bloody battle, and things are blistered into his boyish heart in that battle that never heal over; that tuft of sod is a girl's face--a little girl's face that he loved as a boy; there is his first lawsuit--that ragged pile of leaves by the twig at the log's end; and the twig is his first ten thousand dollars. All of it lies there before him, his victories and his defeats, his millions come, and his millions going--going?--yes, all but gone. Yonder that deep gash in the sod at the left hides a woman's face--pale, wasted, dead on her pillow; and that clean black streak on the ebony cane--that is a tear, and in the tear is a girl's face and back of hers shimmers a boy's countenance. All of John Barclay's life and hopes and dreams and visions are spread out before him on the ground. So he closes his eyes, and braces his soul, and then, having risen, whistles as he limps lightly--for a man past fifty--down to the boat. He rows with a clean manly stroke--even in an old flat-bottomed boat--through the hazy sunset into the dusk. "Jeanette," he said to his daughter that evening at dinner, "I wish you would go to the phone, pretty soon, and tell Molly Culpepper that I want her to come down this evening. I am anxious to see her. The colonel isn't at home, or I'd have him, mother," explained Mr Barclay.