If you wish the odor of the witch-hazel blooms you must go to the swamp a morning after a showery night. Then the odor of the dead leaves will have been all washed out of the air, and the faint, fine fragrance of the latest flowers of the season flits daintily out to greet you as you fare down the path. Yet, though flowers are rare on the third week in October and the pungency of dead leaves pervades the swamp, the upland pastures have a fine fragrance of their own,--a perfume so dainty and alluring that you look for its source in bewilderment, knowing that at this time of year no flowering shrub, no slender-blossoming vine, remains to float it down the wind. It is not the pitchy aroma of the white pines. These have just carpeted all the floors of their house anew with last year’s leaves. The new ones are not pitchy, and that resinous smell which the midsummer sun distills is hardly to be noticed in the wood. Nor are the pasture cedars to be thanked. Their prim, close-wrapping branches give forth a woodsy smell when bruised. It is not a perfume, and it comes only with turmoil. The soft southern wind bears no particle of it to your wistful senses. The hemlocks stand, beautiful but darkly morose, on the north side of the hill, and give forth no scent. I searched the pasture long before I found it. Coming out from under the white pines into an open glade on the more barren soil, where the pitch pines begin to climb the slope, it always seemed stronger than anywhere else. It was as if rose-crowned Cytherea and all her attendant nymphs had just passed from perfumed baths and gone upward through the wood. If the soft moss had shown the heel marks of dainty sandals I should not have looked further. It was as possible that the garments of passing nymphs should have shed sweet odors on the glade as that these should float serenely there when all the flowers were dead. I paused among the pitch pines to consider the matter, and one of them thrust its branch tip directly into my face. Then I thought I knew. The same fragrance emanated from the pitch-pine branch, stronger, indeed, somewhat more resinous, I thought, but practically the same. Six clubs crown the tip of every pitch-pine branch, one standing erect like a plume in the center, five arranged about its base at equal distances, not unlike a five-pointed star. These are the new shoots for next year, in rudimentary form to be sure, but all modeled carefully on what is to be.