THE winter had given a few premonitory symptoms, the winds beginning to come with a cutting edge from the north, the last flowers of the season having long dropped their disconsolate heads, where they had been cut down in their late bloom, and short icicles depending from the eaves on the frosty mornings. One by one, the charms which crown the country during so many months, its roses, its green-sward, its foliage, nay, even the melancholy tints of autumn were withdrawn, until all was bare and desolate, and there was nothing left of all the glorious scene, except to those who can bow down to Nature in her severest moods, and can admire the symmetry of the dismantled oak with as true a feeling as when its limbs were robed in green. Still can you see in its majestic trunk and faultless anatomy, why it bore its honors so gracefully. But the woods were literally stripped. Here and there a dry leaf, crumpled up, shook on the end of a limb with a palsied motion, producing a death-noise, not unlike the reiterated strokes of a small wood-pecker's bill upon the bark. For the rest, a thin layer of dry leaves whirling about among the skeleton shadows of trees, or gathered together in the hollows and the valleys, was all that remained of the tissue of that massive, overarching pall which stretched over the forest for miles. How contractile is the power of death! Caw! caw! caw! The crows flapped their jet black wings over the region of desolation; and hark to the roar of the distant sea! The beautiful shores of the Long-Island Sound, its promontories, coves, and recesses, so late the resort of the invalid or the idle; the trout-streams, the wide plains, the forests filled with sleek deer, as also the places of note upon the sea-shore, had become deserted. Montauk-Point jutted out into the sea more lonely than ever. Glen-Cove lost all its charms, and not the least were those it borrowed from thy presence, glorious Araminta! The Baron Von Trinkets swore that he would die for thee. The Pavilion at Rockaway, where beauty and fashion had so lately woven the dance, was forsaken in all its halls, corridors, and piazzas; while the old steward sat by night in the kitchen-wing, tapping his feet on the hearth to the remembered music of galopades, and voluptuous waltzes. It was, in fact, the latter end of November--a pretty season for an excursion into the Tinnecum bay!