Several days--probably about fifteen, for I did not count them--had passed since I had been admitted into the mother's sleeping-room, when there came an exceedingly lovely day, which seemed to bring to me a pleasant sensation of returning health, and made me long to escape from morbid dreams and vain cravings. Why should I sit at home and mope, I thought; it was better to be active: sun and wind were full of healing. Such a day was in truth one of those captain jewels "that seldom placed are" among the blusterous days of late autumn, with winter already present to speed its parting. For a long time the sky had been overcast with multitudes and endless hurrying processions of wild-looking clouds--torn, wind-chased fugitives, of every mournful shade of color, from palest gray to slatey-black; and storms of rain had been frequent, impetuous, and suddenly intermitted, or passing away phantom-like towards the misty hills, there to lose themselves among other phantoms, ever wandering sorrowfully in that vast, shadowy borderland where earth and heaven mingled; and gusts of wind which, as they roared by over a thousand straining trees and passed off with hoarse, volleying sounds, seemed to mimic the echoing thunder. And the leaves--the millions and myriads of sere, cast-off leaves, heaped ankle-deep under the desolate giants of the wood, and everywhere, in the hollows of the earth, lying silent and motionless, as became dead, fallen things--suddenly catching a mock fantastic life from the wind, how they would all be up and stirring, every leaf with a hiss like a viper, racing, many thousands at a time, over the barren spaces, all hurriedly talking together in their dead-leaf language! until, smitten with a mightier gust, they would rise in flight on flight, in storms and stupendous, eddying columns, whirled up to the clouds, to fall to the earth again in showers, and freckle the grass for roods around. Then for a moment, far off in heavens, there would be a rift, or a thinning of the clouds, and the sunbeams, striking like lightning through their ranks, would illumine the pale blue mist, the slanting rain, the gaunt black boles and branches, glittering with wet, casting a momentary glory over the ocean-like tumult of nature.