Page:Scribner's Monthly, Volume 12 (May–October 1876).djvu/879

Rh AUTUMN TIDES. season is always a little behind the sun in our climate, just as the tide is always. a little behind the moon. According to the calendar, the summer ought to culminate about the 2ist of June, but in reality it is some weeks later; June is a maiden month all through. It is not high noon in nature till about the first or second week in July. When the chestnut tree blooms, the meridian of the year is reached. By the first of August, it is fairly one o'clock. The luster of the season begins to dim, the foliage of the trees and woods to tarnish, the plumage of the birds to fade, and their songs to cease. The hints of approaching fall are on every hand. How suggestive this thistle-down, for instance, which, as I sit by the open window, comes in and brushes softly across my hand ! The first snow-flake tells of winter not more plainly than this driving down heralds the approach of fall. Come here, my fairy, and tell me whence you come and whither you go ? What brings you to port here, you frail ship sailing the great sea? How exquisitely frail and delicate! One of the lightest things in nature; so light that in the closed room here it will hardly rest in my open palm. A feather is a clod beside it. Only a spider's web will hold it; coarser objects have no power over it. Caught in the upper currents of the air and rising above the clouds, it might sail perpetually. Indeed one fancies it might almost traverse the interstellar ether and drive against the stars. And every thistle- head by the road-side holds hundreds of these sky- rovers imprisoned, and unable to set themselves free. Their liberation may be by the shock of the wind, or the rude contact of cattle, but it is oftener the work of the gold-finch with its complaining brood. The seed of the thistle is the proper food of this bird, and in obtaining it, myriads of these winged creatures are scattered to the breeze. Each one is fraught with a seed which it exists to sow, but its wild careering and soaring does not fairly begin till its burden is dropped, and its spheral form is complete: The seeds of many plants and trees are dis- seminated through the agency of birds; but the thistle furnishes its own birds, flocks of them, with wings more ethereal and tireless than were ever given to mortal creature. From the pains nature thus takes to sow the thistle broadcast over the land, it might VOL. XII. 56. be expected to be one of the most trouble- some and abundant of weeds. But such is not the case; the more pernicious and baffling weeds, like snap-dragon or blind-nettles, being more local and restricted in their habits, and unable to fly at all. In the fall, the battles of the spring are fought over again, beginning at the other, or little end of the series. There is the same advance and retreat, with many feints and alarms, between the contending forces that was witnessed in April and May. The spring comes like a tide running against a strong wind; it is ever beaten back, but ever gaining ground, with now and then a mad " push upon the land " as if to over- come its antagonist at one blow. The cold from the north encroaches upon us in about the same fashion. In September or early in October it usually makes a big stride forward and blackens all the more delicate plants, and hastens the " mortal ripening " of the foliage of the trees, but it is presently beaten back again and the genial warmth re-possesses the land. Before long, how- ever, the cold returns to the charge with augmented forces and gains much ground. In both spring and fall, it may be likened to the damming of a stream ; the cur- rent meets with a check, a reverse, is thrown back upon itself, but it accumulates, it is stored up, not dispersed, and when it breaks away again its strength and volume are just so much increased. The cold snaps we have in the fall are the cold of many days concentrated in one. The course of the seasons never do run smooth, owing to the unequal distribution of land and water, mountain and plain. So with the warm spells in spring: a week is robbed of its warmth to give a touch of May temperature to March. An equilibrium however is usually reached in our climate in October, sometimes the most marked in November, fonning the de- licious Indian summer; a truce is declared and both forces, heat and cold, meet and mingle in friendly converse on the field. In the earlier season, this poise of the tempera- ture, this slack water in nature, comes in May and June; but the October calm is most marked. Day after day, and sometimes week after week, you cannot tell which way the current is setting. Indeed there is no current, but the season seems to drift a little this way, or a little that, just as the breeze