A gust of wind strikes a tall willow just as I approach it. See the leaves tumble! Thick and fast they come, a leafy shower, with none of those pretty, hesitating, parachute-like reluctances which we noticed the rounder and lighter birch leaves practicing half an hour ago. The willow leaves, narrow and pointed, fall more like arrows. I am put in mind, I cannot tell why, of an early morning hour, years ago, when I happened to cross a city garden after the first killing frost, and stopped near a Kentucky coffee-tree. Its foliage had been struck with death. Not a breath was stirring, but the leaves, already blackened and curled, dropped in one continuous rain. The tree was out of its latitude, and had been caught with its year’s work half done. The frost was a tragedy. This breeze among the willow branches is nothing so bad as that. Its errand is all in the order of nature. It calls those who are ready. My meditations are still running with the season, still playing with mortality, when a blue jay quits a branch near by (I had not seen him) and flies off in silence. The jay is a knowing bird. No need to tell _him_ that there is a time for everything under the sun. He has proverbial philosophy to spare. Hark! he has found his voice; like a saucy schoolboy, who waits till he is at a safe distance and then puts his thumb to his nose, and cries “Yaah, yaah!” Well, the reader may thank him for one thing. He has made an end of my autumnal sermon, the text of which, if any one cares to look for it, may be found in the sixty-fourth chapter of Isaiah, at the sixth verse. A TEXT FROM THOREAU “There is no more tempting novelty than this new November. No going to Europe or to another world is to be named with it. Give me the old familiar walk, post-office and all, with this ever new self, with this infinite expectation and faith which does not know when it is beaten. We’ll go nutting once more. We’ll pluck the nut of the world and crack it in the winter evenings. Theatres and all other sight-seeing are puppet shows in comparison. I will take another walk to the cliff, another row on the river, another skate on the meadow, be out in the first snow, and associate with the winter birds. Here I am at home. In the bare and bleached crust of the earth, I recognize my friend.” Thus bravely did Thoreau enter upon the gray month. It was in 1858, when he was forty-one years old. He wants nothing new, he assures himself. He will “take the shortest way round and stay at home.” “Think of the consummate folly of attempting to go away from _here_,” he says, underscoring the final word. As if whatever place a man might move to would not be “here” to him! As if he could run away from his own shadow! So I interpret the italics.