How well I know what I mean to do when the long dark autumn evenings come: and where, my soul, is thy pleasant hue? with the music of all thy voices, dumb in life's November too! I shall be found by the fire, suppose, o'er a great wise book, as beseemeth age; while the shutters flap as the cross-wind blows, and I turn the page, and I turn the page, not verse now, only prose! Till the young ones whisper, finger on lip, "There he is at it, deep in Greek: now then, or never, out we slip to cut from the hazels by the creek a mainmast for our ship!" I shall be at it indeed, my friends! Greek puts already on either side such a branch-work forth as soon extends to a vista opening far and wide, and I pass out where it ends. The outside-frame, like your hazel-trees--but the inside-archway widens fast, and a rarer sort succeeds to these, and we slope to Italy at last and youth, by green degrees. I follow wherever I am led, knowing so well the leader's hand: oh woman-country, wooed not wed, loved all the more by earth's male-lands, laid to their hearts instead! Look at the ruined chapel again half-way up in the Alpine gorge! Is that a tower, I point you plain, or is it a mill, or an iron-forge breaks solitude in vain? A turn, and we stand in the heart of things; the woods are round us, heaped and dim; from slab to slab how it slips and springs, the thread of water single and slim, thro' the ravage some torrent brings! Does it feed the little lake below? That speck of white just on its marge is Pella; see, in the evening-glow, how sharp the silver spear-heads charge when Alp meets heaven in snow! On our other side is the straight-up rock; and a path is kept 'twixt the gorge and it by boulder-stones where lichens mock the marks on a moth, and small ferns fit their teeth to the polished block. Oh the sense of the yellow mountain-flowers, and thorny balls, each three in one, the chestnuts throw on our path in showers! for the drop of the woodland fruit's begun, these early November hours, that crimson the creeper's leaf across like a splash of blood, intense, abrupt, o'er a shield else gold from rim to boss, and lay it for show on the fairy-cupped elf-needled mat of moss, by the rose-flesh mushrooms, undivulged last evening--nay, in to-day's first dew yon sudden coral nipple bulged, where a freaked fawn-colored flaky crew of toadstools peep indulged. And yonder, at foot of the fronting ridge that takes the turn to a range beyond, is the chapel reached by the one-arched bridge, where the water is stopped in a stagnant pond danced over by the midge. The chapel and bridge are of stone alike, blackish-gray and mostly wet; cut hemp-stalks steep in the narrow dyke. See here again, how the lichens fret and the roots of the ivy strike! Poor little place, where its one priest comes on a festa-day, if he comes at all, to the dozen folk from their scattered homes, gathered within that precinct small by the dozen ways one roams--to drop from the