There is not a month when the gold of the sun and the silver of the moon are not woven, when the rose of sunset does not lie upon hills which reddened to the rose of dawn, when the rainbow is not let loose from the tangled nets of rain and wind, when the morning-star and the evening-star do not rise and set. And yet, for some, there is no month that has the veiled magic of September. ‘The month of peace,’ ‘the month of beauty,’ it is called in many Gaelic songs and tales; and often, ‘Summer-end.’ I remember an old _rann_, perhaps still said or sung before the peat-fires, that it was in this month God created Peace; again, an island-tale of Christ as a shepherd and the months as sheep strayed upon the hills of time. The Shepherd went out upon the hills, and gathered them one by one, and led them to the fold: but, before the fold was reached, a great wind of snow came down out of the corries, and on the left a wild flood arose, and on the narrow path there was room only, and that hardly, for the Shepherd. So He looked to see which one of the twelve He might perchance save, by lifting it in His strong arms and going with it alone to the fold. He looked long, for all were the children of His Father. Then He lifted September, saying, ‘Even so, because thou art the month of fulfilment, and because thy secret name is Peace.’ But when He came out of the darkness to the fold, the Shepherd went back between the wild lips of flood and tempest, and brought to the fold June, saying, ‘Because thy secret name is Joy’: and, in turn, one by one, He brought each to the fold, saying unto each, in this order, ‘May, because thy secret name is Love’; ‘April, because thou art made of tears and laughter’; ‘July, because thou art Beauty’; ‘August, thou quiet Mother’; ‘October, because thy name is Content’; ‘March, because thy name is Strife’; ‘February, because thy name is Hope’; ‘November, because thy name is Silence’; ‘January, because thou art Death’; and at the last, ‘December, whom I have left to the end, for neither tempest could whelm nor flood drown thee, for thy name is the Resurrection and the Life.’ And when the tale was told, some one would say, ‘But how, then, was September chosen first?’ And the teller would say, ‘Because its secret name is Peace, and Peace is the secret name of Christ.’ It is no wonder the poets have loved so well this month whose name has in it all the witchery of the North. There is the majesty of the hill-solitudes in it, when the moorlands are like a purple sea. It has the freshness of the dew-white bramble-copses, of the bracken become russet and pale gold, of the wandering frostfire along the highways of the leaf, that mysterious breath whose touch is silent flame. It is the month when the sweet, poignant second-song of the robin stirs the heart as a child’s gladness among tears. ‘The singer of September,’ a Gaelic poet calls it, and many will recall the lovely lines of the old half-forgotten Elizabethan poet on the bird