All these sounds belong to the calm autumnal days, and while
they differ the whole heavens from the merry songs of spring, there is
nothing sad about them. No! No! nothing sad. I remember (and who that
was reared in the country does not) when I was a boy, how I went out
in the sunny days of autumn, after the frosts had painted the
hillsides, to gather chestnuts; and when the breeze rustled among the
branches, how the nuts came rattling down; and how if the winds were
still, I climbed into the trees and shook their tops, and how the
chestnuts pattered to the ground like a shower of hail. I remember the
squirrels how they chattered, and chased each other up and down the
trees, or leaped from branch to branch, gathering here and there a
nut, and scudding away to their store houses in the hollow trees,
providing in this season of plenty for the barrenness of the winter
months. I remember, too, how we gathered, in those same old autumnal
days, hickory-nuts and butter-nuts by the bushel; and how pleasant it
was in the long cold winter evenings, to sit around the great old
kitchen fire-place, cracking the nuts we had gathered when the green,
the yellow, the crimson, the brown, the grey, and the pale leaves were
on the trees. Pleasant evenings those seem to me now, as they come
floating down on the current of memory from the long past, and dear
are the faces of those that made up the tableaux as they were grouped
around those winter fires.
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