The tan of hickories and the tawny yellow of chestnuts seem to break through this haze as the floating gulf weed does off Turk’s Island or among the Bahamas, and when birds lift from the tree tops and sail away, it is as if a school of flying fishes were darting across your steamer’s prow. The softly-breathing southern air is welling up from this mid-ocean river of mysterious romance and floating films of dreams all along our too clear-cut hills. To-morrow the wind will be in the northwest again, the morning sun will glint on fields that are hoar with frost, and in the afternoon the Blue Hills will be blue no more, but brown with the rustling tannin of dead scrub oak leaves seen too clearly,--gray with granite angles, and sharply cut against a sky from which all dreams have fled. We had thought the summer too long and too hot, we welcomed the crispness and vigor of autumn, but to-day we walked abroad with joy in the warmth that again thrills us as with a fine touch of youth come back, and as little crinkles of heat shimmer upward from the brown fields we push forward, eager to bathe in it all once more. All the out-door world seems dreamy with the same delight. The blue jays flutter back and forth on softer wing, and their usual strident clangor is subdued to an almost caressing babble, in which you think you hear the tones of spring love-making. They know the feel of nesting weather, and though it is but for a day it soothes them to happy response. This morning a robin, sure that spring had come again, sat up on the elm tree outside my window and greeted it with full-throated song, just as he had in June, and all day long there has been twittering of birds in the pasture and the forest. Only a few of our host of summer visitor song birds remain, and the great wave of southward migration has passed us, yet to-day the pasture was vocal with the twittering of late passing warblers, and some even sang, _sotto voce_, to a sand-dance accompaniment of rustling leaves. The myrtle warblers were busy among the blue-gray, waxy, aromatic berries of the bayberry, which is their favorite food. The crop is good this year, portions of the pasture being almost blue with the close-set berries, and I think the myrtle warblers will linger long with us. Indeed, they have been reported as staying all winter when the bayberry supply is ample and sheltered from the worst of the north winds. If they do the robins will stay with them, for the crop of cedar berries is a good one also. Almost all the red cedars have some, and some are so thick-set with them that their bronze-green, now yellowing a little with the lessening sap, is all lightened up with an alluring blue. I do not blame the robins for lingering long with the cedar berries. I like them myself. They are a little dry, but very pleasantly sweet; and after the sweetness is gone there lingers on the palate a spicy aromatic flavor which is most enticing.