Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 137.djvu/655

1885.] to sleep, up on the mountains a blaze of departing splendour is bursting into glory. For weeks past Nature has been quietly at work laying in the ground-tints, and painting in one touch of bright colour after the other; but it is now only that the picture is completed, and stands forth for a brief time of perfection, for soon the winter will begin to undo the summer's work.

The Hercules valley is dazzling in winter, fairy - like in spring, majestic in summer; but autumn remains its season of beauty: and this autumn is a singularly dry autumn, with no rains to rot the leaves, nothing but sunshine to wither them brilliantly. A wildfire seems to have flown over the hillside, and touched each maple-tree, till it flames like a burning brand; the low masses of bilberry-bushes, clustering between the rocks, begin to warm into colour, glowing hot as timbers. The rocks themselves, even the sober grey rocks, do not disdain to decorate themselves, and wear patches of gaudy mosses in honour of the departing summer. What had been bright before becomes brilliant now – what had been brilliant now reaches magnificence. Green turns into rich brown, and brown changes to molten gold.

But it is in the world above that the splendour is thrown about most recklessly. Here magnificence has run riot. There is on all sides a waste of richness which almost over-surfeits the eye. Every coloured lichen on the tree-stems, which in summer was delicate and small, has become magnified to double its size; every tuft of moss on the rotting carcass of a fallen trunk has deepened its pile and intensified its colour.

The dead trees are making preparations for their winter funeral; the monarchs of the forest are lying in state, swathed in velvet, crowned with gold, and decked out with a brilliancy of ornament well worthy of a departed king. Bright fungi are the most gorgeous among these ornaments. These mysterious and capricious children of the forest have started up in thousands immediately after the first autumn showers, and have continued to increase ever since, fed by the fatness of the soil, though no more rain has fallen. Piles of fungi, scarlet, blue, orange, and purple, have grown out of the bark of the trees, or stand in clusters covering the forest-floor, each cluster like a handful of jewels which have been scattered broadcast. There are monster pearls on the branches overhead, and giant coral reared on all sides; glistening sprays, delicately cut and fancifully ramified, decorate the pathway.

It is difficult to believe that these gems are nothing but toadstools; it is still more difficult to believe that these same toadstools form an important article of diet in a Roumanian peasant-household. The forests thus hold an inexhaustible fund of maigre dishes. Moreover, there seems to be a sort of mutual understanding between Nature and the Greek Church. They have accommodated each other. Nature is kind enough to treasure up these stores for the time of fast; or perhaps the Greek Church has invented these fasts for the purpose of consuming the unlimited stores which the forests hold.

"They string them upon cords and hang them up to dry," said the Bohemian, somewhat contemptuously, as he pointed out a clump of fungi, in shape and colour closely resembling a pile of ripe apricots; " or else they keep them in vinegar until they want them, and then