and for a time they moult no feather, drop no leaf; or, if one circles down here and there, it is huddled by in a corner, and they flatter themselves that none has noticed. But you watch with pitying love, knowing what the end must be. And you perceive how great the effort, the strain, becomes, to keep up appearances. Here and there, at last, despite of their utmost endeavour, the hidden fire bursts out; and finally, with a wild Autumnal wail, some weaker tree, in despair, gives up the unnatural and too excessive strain, and casts down a great profusion of yellow sickly foliage. There is a murmur among the stouter trees; but, in good truth, they are not sorry for the excuse, while, muttering that all is rendered useless now, like avowed bankrupts, they give up the effort to sustain appearances, and, as it were, with a sigh of relief and rest, resign them to the fate they vainly strove against and could not long avert. So the elm flames out into bars and patches, very yellow in the dark; and the chesnut is all tinged and burnt with brown; and the mulberry has slipped off all her leaves in a single night; and the ash and the sycamore blacken; and the white poplar leaves change to pale gold; and the pear to bronze; and the wild cherry to scarlet; and the maple to orange; and the bramble at their feet to bright crimson. [Illustration] Not so yet, in the Twilight of the year. It is the month of tranquillity, of peaceful hush. If there be a hint of decay, it is but what has been called “calm decay”; it is but evening with the landscape, the Evening of the year. You might forget, as you looked at the resting stationary aspect of things, that the further change, the Night of Winter, was indeed drawing near. There seems no prophecy of those wild tossing October arms, with the stream of leaves hurrying away in the wind; no presage of the dull November days, when, from the scanty foliage of the trees, great drops plash down upon the decaying leaves beneath, and the whole wood looms out of the fog. Far less, in the full-bosomed, sober, rather air- than mist-mellowed woodlands, do you detect any foretelling of the time when all will stand, a bare thicket of gaunt boughs and naked twigs, dully shadowed in the ice, or made darker and more dreary by the great white fields of snow. Of all this there is no hint given yet, nor need we yet awake to the knowledge that we have indeed bid the Summer farewell till next year. The evenings are still warm, warm with that cool warmth which is so delicious: it will be some time yet before we can see our breath as we talk: we can stay out well until eight or later, and hear through the open window the clatter of arranging tea-cups, and watch the lamp, still faint in the twilight, warm the room with a dim orange glow.