Page:Far from the Maddening Girls.djvu/203

 ever seen them. A blue haze from brush-fires somewhere in the distance filtered through the woods, blurring the vistas to an appearance of being slightly out of focus which charmed the eye with an incomparable softness, and stinging the nostrils not unpleasantly with its acrid pungency. Spring is the season of silence. She stands tip-toed and finger on lip, breathlessly awaiting the miracle of resurrection. But autumn is all haste and anxious preparation against the threatening peril of the snows. This floor of dry leaves, levelly laid, and polished, each of them, as if their surfaces had been of fawn lacquer, was the canopy over an infinity of unseen and intermingling thoroughfares, through which the tiny denizens of the world of under-foot scuttled nimbly about their affairs, unapparent to my coarser perception, save in that, as I stood still, news of their activities came to me in the form of the faintest imaginable rustle. Larger, though no less timid, creatures