The clouds hung unevenly over the climbing
mountains, so that far snow-bestrewn headlands looked like the speckly
backs of monsters stalking up into the sky.
I walked through miles and miles of brown bracken and rosy withered
azalea leaves. There came a day of rain, and I spent thirty-six hours
in a deserted house, staring most of the time at the continuous drench
that poured from the sky. I made myself tea several times from the
rainwater that rushed off the roof. I crouched over a log fire, and
wondered where the summer had gone.
It needed but a day of rain to show how tired all nature was. The
leaves that were weighed down with water failed to spring back when
the rain had passed. The dry and dusty shrubs did not wash green as
they do in the spring. All became yellower and browner. That which had
come out of the earth took a long step back towards the earth again.
Tramping all day through a sodden forest, I also experienced the
autumnal feeling, the promise of rest, a new gentleness. All things
which have _lived_ through the summer welcome the autumn, the twilight
of the long hot day, the grey curtain pulled down over a drama which
is played out.
All day the leaves blew down as if the trees were preparing beds for
the night of winter. In a month all the woods would be bare and stark,
the bushes naked, the wild flowers lost in the copse; nought green but
the evergreens.
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