Here are red maples as bare as December, and yonder is one that is almost in full leaf; and by some freak of originality every leaf is bright yellow. Three days more and it will be naked also. Under it are white-alder bushes (_Clethra_) clothed in dark purple, and tall blueberry bushes all in red, with yellow shadings by way of contrast. This is in a swampy spot, where a lonesome hyla is peeping. Just beyond, the drier ground is reddened--under the trees--with huckleberry and dangleberry. Nobody who has not attended to the matter would imagine how much of the brightness of our New England autumn--one of the pageants of the world--is due to these lowly bushes, which most people think of solely as useful in the production of pies and puddings. Without being mown, the huckleberry bears a second crop--a crop of color. It is twice blest; it blesses him that eats and him that looks. In many parts of New England, at least, the autumnal landscape could better spare the maples than the blueberries and the huckleberries. Rum-cherry trees and shrubs--more shrubs than trees--are dressed in lovely shades of yellow and salmon. Spicebushes wear plain yellow of a peculiarly delicate cast. I roll a leaf in my hand and find it still spicy. A bush looks handsomer, I believe, if it is known to smell good. The same thought came to me a week ago while I was admiring the sassafras leaves. They were then just at the point of ripeness. Now they have turned to a dead brown. The maple’s way is in better taste--to shed its leaves while they are still bright and fresh. They are under my feet now, a carpet of red and yellow. One of the oddest bits of fall coloration (I cannot profess greatly to like it) is the ghostly white--greenish white--of Roxbury waxwork leaves. It is unique in these parts, so far as I can recall, but is almost identical with the pallor of striped maple foliage (_Acer Pennsylvanicum_) as one sees it in the White Mountains. Waxwork pigments all go to the berries, it appears. These are showy enough to suit the most barbaric taste, and are among the things that speak to me strongest of far-away times, when my childish feet were just beginning to wander in nature’s garden. The sight of them reminds me of what a long time I have lived.