So wail and roar the storm-swept autumn woods. In the late October nights you may awaken, when the world is lost in the mystery of darkness, and hear that appealing cry. Time and civilization have slain the dryads and sweet sylvan populace, as Herod slew the innocents. But although common-sense has buried them, the imagination will not let them die. They survive in other forms, and with other voices they speak to us--not as the spirits of the trees, but as their conscious life, they yet whisper, and our hearts listen. Let the hickories and pine-trees preach to us a little in these warm October afternoons. A stately elm is the archbishop of my green diocese. In full canonicals he stands sublime. His flowing robes fill the blithe air with sacred grace. The light west winds and watery south are his fresh young deacons, his ecclesiastical aides-de-camp. He rules the landscape round. And I--this penitent old Easy Chair--attend devoutly when I hear the eloquent rustling of his voice--as the neighbors of Saint George Herbert, of Bemerton, used to stop their ploughs in the furrow and bow, with uncovered head, while the sound of his chapel-bell tinkled in the air. FROM COMO TO MILAN DURING THE WAR OF 1848. As the afternoon was ending--walking from Lago Maggiore and the Lake of Lugano to the Lake of Como--we passed a shrine at which a mother and children were kneeling and chanting the Ave Maria, and an ass with loaded panniers jogged slowly by. The vesper bells began to ring from an old church-tower upon a mountain-side, while far over the rounding tops of orange and fig trees in the warm-descending vale a triangle of dark-blue water was the first glimpse of Como. My knees bent a little, not with fatigue, but with reverence, as if I were again entering the very court and heart of Italy. A group of girls, less timorous or more interested than the crowd upon the Lugano Lake shore, asked us if there were any news--if France were coming to help Italy. But ours, alas! were not the beautiful feet upon the mountains. We could only say "nothing" and "good-bye." At Santa Croce we came out in full view of the lake, upon which lay the splendor of sunset, and, taking a path which we were told would shorten the journey, we lost our way upon a huge hill-side. But as we reached the summit the full moon rose from behind the heights upon the opposite shores of Como, and a handsome Italian boy showed us a straight path to Cadenabia upon the margin of the lake. I gave him a silver trifle, and he wished us "felice viaggio" with his black eyes and his musical lips; and leaving him like a shepherd boy of the purer Arcadia of the hills, we descended rapidly into a vineyard, and so came to the shore.