It is an enchanted vision of nature’s autumn loveliness--a vision of peace and tranquil resignation that lingers like a poem in the memory. It is a glorious October day, one of those rarest and loveliest of days when all nature seems transfigured, when a golden, misty veil swings from the heavens in a charmed haze, through which the commonest and most prosaic thing seems spiritualized and glorified. The summer’s full fruition is past and gone, the dross has been consumed; and in the lingering life, whose yielding flush now lends its sweet expression to the declining year, we see the type of perfect trust and hope that finds a fitting emblem in the dim horizon, where heaven and earth are wedded in a golden haze, where purple hills melt softly in the sky. It is a day when one may dream with open eyes, and whose day-dreams haunt the memory as sweet realities. The sky is filled with rolling, fleecy clouds, whose flat receding bases seem to float upon a transparent amber sea, from whose depths I look through into the blue air beyond. Below me an ancient orchard skirts the borders of the knoll. Its boughs are crimson studded, and the ground beneath is strewn with the bright red fruit. They mark the minutes as they fall, running the gauntlet of the craggy twigs and bounding upon the slope beneath. Beyond the orchard stretch the low, flat meadow lands, set with alders and swamp-maples, with swaying willows, now enclosing, now revealing the graceful curves of the quiet stream as it winds in and out among the overhanging foliage. Soon it is lost beneath a wooded hill, where an old square tower and factory-bell betray the hiding-place of the glassy pond that sends its splashing water-fall across the rocks beneath the old town bridge. Looking down upon this bridge, Mount Pisgah, with its rugged cliff, is seen rising bold and stern against the sky, above a broad and bright mosaic of elms and maples, spreading from the grove of oaks near by in an unbroken expanse, to the very foot of the precipice, with here and there a sunny cupola or gable peering out among the branches, or a snowy steeple lifting high its golden cross or weather-vane glittering in the sun. The mountain-side is lit up with its autumn glow of intermingled maples, oaks, and beeches, with its changeless ledges of jutting rock, and dense, defiant pines standing like veteran bearded sentinels in perpetual vigilance. All this comes to me in a single glimpse beneath the branches. But there are others, where undulating meadows, with their flowing lines of walls and fences, lead the eye through soft gradations to distant purple hills, through thrifty farms, with barns and barracks and rowen fields with browsing cattle, and ruddy buckwheat patches, where the flocks of village pigeons congregate among the cradle marks, in quest of scattered kernels shaken from the sheaves.