Page:How and Why Library 226.jpg

 ====III. Autumn: "When the Wind Blows"==== What is it the magician says in fairy stories, when he makes the most surprising things happen?

"Presto, change!" and he claps his hands.

Jack Frost is this wonder worker of the forest. After a still, sharp night in October, a hundred things seem to have happened all at once. The ground is white with frozen dew. The trees are great torches of gold and red. They blaze all the brighter because the sky is veiled with a violet haze.

It is the maples that first light up our woods with these flickering fires. No country of the old world has trees that make such a wonderful color show as our maples. Their leaves are never of one tint, but are mottled and shaded, from lemon yellow to orange, flame-red and crimson. You know the thin-leafed red maple sifts sunlight. To look up through one, in the fall, is like looking through a splendid stained glass window of a church.

The oaks show no yellow, and the leaves are of a strong solid color. But different varieties of oaks give them a range of all the reds from scarlet to wine, and then add warm browns and bronze greens. The elms and beeches are in russet yellows, the birches and poplars pure gold, the nut trees yellow. On every brook the willow leaves float like little fleets of sunny canoes. The fairy craft drift down stream, swirl over eddies and go under.

Below the boughs of the tall trees, all these colors are repeated in the shrubs and vines. The sumac is a burning bush with torch-cones of seeds. The broad leaves of the grape vine turn to bronze. The berry briars are dark as the wine oaks. The big, smooth sassafras leaves are mottled in orange and flame, like the maples. There are notes of purple in the clusters of wild grapes, in the leaves of the alders and some of the ashes; and of scarlet in the seed hips of roses, the clustered berries of the mountain ash and of the bittersweet vine. Below all these the foot-high seedlings of the forest show the colors of the parent trees, among the brown of frost-bitten ferns and fallen leaves.

There is no hurry about anything. The autumn trees often take three or four weeks of Indian summer to strip their boughs for winter. The leaves drift down, silently, like great colored butterflies. Whole