It is different with these. There is a hardier quality in their nature and they seem to revel in the killing frosts of late autumn and the ice and snow of winter; I find them as green and as hearty in December as I do now. Next to the tender ferns it is the woody undergrowth that recognizes the season first. Long ago some limb of a red maple growing in the shade has been seen to flare up with a sudden flame while else all the wood was green. But this in itself is no sign. This happens here and there in low ground even in very early summer. Now, however, it is not only here and there but everywhere that you will find this occasional limb adding scarlet beauty to the sombre shade of the deep wood, and as your glance passes from the cool pale ferns to this it slips on and finds color growing on many things in the woodland shadow. Here is the cornel, whose lovely blooms filled the forest with butterfly beauty, it seems no longer ago than yesterday. Today I find the cornel foliage green still as to midrib and veining, but with the woof of the leaf gone such a fine apple red that it is surely good enough to eat. If color counts the deer should find rich browse in the shrubbery these days. The hazels that were so green are suddenly a ripe brown that is all warm with red tones, and where the summac grows there is forest fire without smoke burning in the scarlet flame-tongues of the pointed leaflets of this modern burning bush. And all this is beneath the shelter of the still green forest into which we must go to find it. From without the full green of summer ripeness prevails, and we must seek other signs of the autumn season. But must we, after all? Yesterday or the day before it was true and we were saying that the summer held on well. Today, so suddenly does the change seem to become visible, I saw them blaze up out of a cool swamp at the foot of the hill on which I stood. The smoke of autumn's peace pipe was blue on all the distant hills, and he must have dropped his match in my swamp, where it smouldered and flared and caught the maple even as I looked in the full expectancy of seeing nothing but green. The red fire of greeting seemed to run from tree to tree, and all the lowlands for a mile were ablaze, as if some subdominant political party had won an unexpected victory and could not wait for night to light its fires of celebration. All the little swamp maples were red with this fire, and though I suppose they have been days in turning the effect was that of their flashing up as I looked. Then I saw that the birches among them were all set with candles, whose pale yellow flames lighted them with a most chaste fire, just as in the old days of torchlight enthusiasm over political campaigns we used to put rows of them in the windows on the night that the parade was to pass. Seeing all that I felt as if autumn were again triumphantly elected, and we all ought to take off our hats and "give three cheers far the illumination on the right." *****