The Soothsayer had long been urging me to come and help him worship the Wissahickon Drive, and when luck and the happy moment conspired, I found myself carried swiftly past the Washington Monument at the Park entrance and along the margin of the twinkling Schuylkill. At the first there was nothing of the hermit in the Soothsayer’s conversation. He was bitterly condemning the handicraft of a certain garage mechanic who had done something to his “clutch.” He included this fallacious artisan in the class of those he deems most degraded: The People Who Don’t Give a Damn. For intellectual convenience, the Soothsayer tersely ascribes all ills that befall him to Bolshevism. If the waitress is tardy in delivering his cheese omelet, she is a bolshevixen. If a motortruck driver skims his polished fender, he is a bolshevik. In other words, those who Don’t Give a Damn are bolsheviks. The Soothsayer lamented that I had not been in the Park with him two weeks ago, when the autumn foliage was a blaze of glowing color. But to my eye the tints (it was the first of November) were unsurpassably lovely. It was a keen afternoon, the air was sharp, the sky flushing with rose and massed with great banks of cloud the bluish hue of tobacco smoke. When we neared the corner of Peter’s Island the sun slid from under a cloudy screen and transfused the thin bronze-yellow of the trees with a pale glow which sparkled as the few remaining leaves fluttered in the wind. Most of the leafage had fallen and was being burnt in bonfires at the side of the road, where the gusts tossed and flattened the waving flames. But the trees were still sufficiently clothed to show a rich tapestry of russet and orange and brown, sharpened here and there by wisps and shreds of yellow. And where the boughs were wholly stripped (the silver-gray beeches, for instance) their delicate twigs were clearly traced against the sky. I think one hears too much of the beauty of October’s gold and scarlet and not enough of the sober, wistful richness of November buffs and duns and browns.