acknowledge how sweet is the companionship of the wild rose and how he hopes it may go on forever. Stray red cedars stroll about the lower slopes and climb gravely, while juniper, in close-set prickly clumps, seems to follow their leadership. The canny, chancy thistle holds its rosy pompons up to the bumble-bees, that fairly burrow in them for their Scotch honey, and the mullein would be even more erect and more Quakerly drab than the steeplebush if it could. It is erect and gray, but just as it means to look its grimmest dancing whorls of yellow sunshine blossom up its stalk in spirals, the last one fairly taking flight from the tip. Among all these strays the yarrow, whose aroma is as much a New England odor as that of sweet-fern or bayberry. The aromatic incense of this herb follows you up the hill and seems to bring the pungent presence of the poet himself. Job’s steepest hillside drops you in one long swoop to the road which leads through woodland windings to the haunted bridge over Country Brook. The way itself is haunted by woodland fragrance and chant of birds innumerable, and in the freshness of the morning after the shower it seemed as if built new. The world is apt to be this way after rain. Yet if the vivid morning sun and exhilarating north wind had driven all ghosts away there had been necromancy at work. All the day before the blossoms on the staghorn sumac had been of that velvety pink that rivals the wild rose. Over night they had turned a warm, rich red. Autumn brings this richer, more stable color to the sumac blooms as they ripen toward seed time, but it does not do it in July, over night. The pukwudgies had been at work, painting with the rain, filling the sumac heads with it till they hung heavy. The water had massed the tiny pubescence of the blooms till pink had deepened into red and autumn had seemed to come for the sumacs in a night. It took the sun and the wind all day to dry them out and bring back the witchery of pink that the necromancy of the rain had banished. But the spell was not altogether broken, nor will it be till autumn has worked its will with the world about Country Brook. Out of the birches the fresh wind threshed here and there yellow leaves that fluttered like colias butterflies before it. There and here among the sumacs hung a crimson leaf, more vivid in its color than the blossoms or the berries could ever be, and as in the woodland all news flashes from shrub to shrub and from creature to creature, so it seemed as in the hint of autumn, first born, a simulacrum merely, in the wet sumac heads, had gone by birch leaf messengers to all distances. Along the way flashed out of invisibility the yellow of tall goldenrod heads and the blue and white of the earliest asters and, once materialized, remained.