Watching leaves adrift on November winds, there comes the memory of Stevenson’s song of another ended life—of days they “lived the better part. April came to bloom and never dim December breathed its killing chill.” But the tree that wore them, standing in stripped starkness that month—if stark means strong—shall enter dazzling splendors when the days of ice storms come. That miracle of lucent grayness, an elm in the morning sun, when every branch and every smallest twig is cased in ice outdoes its green enchantments of June. It is more beautiful than a tree of coral. It is the color of pussy willows made to shine. It is as gray as sunrise cobwebs on the grass, as starlight on dew. Its branches, tossed by January, clash sword on delicate sword, or, left quiet, the elm stands like a pensive dancer and swings against one another long strands of crystal beads. And in the city little ice-sheathed maples along an avenue, glistening under white arc lights, surpass the changing lusters of gray enamel. Trees robed in ice are the very home of light, of fire frozen fast in water and turned pale. Between the going and coming of the leaves the sky is background for the cunning lacework of twigs. Were it always May, we should never see how finely wrought is the loom upon which those leafy embroideries are woven. In autumn the design is more austere, the colors show more somber, but when the March branches flush with sap, and the buds, waking, put forth hesitant green fingers, that infinitely complex tracery of the twigs is a spring charm as moving as the perfume of the thorn. Outlined against a sunset, it foretells in beauty the months when the leaf chorus will sound with the birds’. CHAPTER XVI. THE BROWN FRONTIER [Illustration] One warm March noon a hushing wing is lifted from the piping nest of earth. Voices of forest floor, tree trunk, and lowground break forth, never to be silent again until Thanksgiving weather finds a muted world. Croon and murmur from the swaying grasses, brief lyrics from the top of the thorn, a sunrise chant from the bee tree, rise and fall through all the hours of dew and light, intense in the sun-rusted fields, climbing to an ecstatic swan song when frosts hover close. Whoever walks through middle realms of the woods, never lying on the mosses nor winning to skyward branches of the trees, has not shared the earth’s most ardent life—the pensive songs a bird sings merely for himself; his impulsive, goalless flights; and rarer still the industry and traffic at the roots of growth: the epic of the ground.