Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 75.djvu/394

390 Hudson and Connecticut. Spring is always appreciably earlier in such places. It spreads later over the uplands. We are apt to think of our rivers as flowing eastward to the ocean, when in reality they flow almost directly southward. This is true, at least, of the more northerly rivers—the Connecticut, Hudson, Delaware and Susquehanna, and of the larger rivers flowing into the Gulf of Maine, as the Kennebec and the Penobscot. South of the Chesapeake the rivers do come more directly from the west.

The physical basis of this advent of spring is the northward movement of a definite line of heat (the isotherm of 43.8 degrees F.) that calls into germinal life the slumbering forces of vegetation, awakens the hibernating animal and urges the migratory bird to seek its northern nesting place. An expanding zone of green marks this creeping of the vanguard of spring up river valleys, over hill country and along mountain slopes until all the land is invaded and the frost giant driven back to his hyperborean realm. In woods almost the first touch of spring is seen when the branches of the spice-bush break out in yellow blossoms. In fields, at this time, the plow is turning over the fallow and the air is redolent of earthy smells. In gardens the sod-breaking crocus and daffodil appear along the squalid, unkempt borders. From meadow pools comes the piping chorus of cricket frogs. Crows are brooding in remote woodlands, and the grackle flocks and robins have returned. This is spring as we know it on the Atlantic slope to-day and as our fathers knew it after the first planting of the wilderness.

Spring waxes into summer and summer wanes into autumn and after the gorgeous pageant of the leaf has passed there steals over this land a time of strange stillness. A haze, like the farthest waftings of some distant forest smoke, broods over the landscape, veiling its features and filling the responsive mind with a vague sense of mystery. There is a mellowness of sight and sound; all that was harsh and discordant seems now blended into one harmonious tone by the enchanted haze. All too soon these few delightful days are dispelled and we stand upon the threshold of winter. This charming period, coming in November, has been called the Indian Summer. The reason for its name is not obvious. It suggests remoteness, like some old Celtic tale, and there are those of us who would fain think of it as a heritage from the aboriginal past. Students who have investigated the matter will scarcely credit such vain imaginings, but however the name may have come, it is surely most happily associated with a dreamy spell of weather in the late days of the American autumn.

The influence which this threshold of the new land had upon the mind and character of the people is perhaps more apparent than are its