and painted for no more mysterious reason than that his eye delighted in beautiful natural effects, and that he loved to play with paint and brushes. Though he was undoubtedly sensitive somewhere to the mystic side of Nature, her Wordsworthian "intimations," you would hardly have guessed it from his talk. "A bully bit of colour," would be his craftsmanlike way of describing a twilight full of sibylline suggestiveness to the literary mind. But, strangely enough, when he brought you his sketch, all your "sibylline suggestiveness" was there, which of course means, after all, that painting was his way of seeing and saying it.

The moon rose as we smoked on, and began to lattice with silver the darkness of the glen, and flood the hillside with misty radiance. Colin made for his sketch-box.

"I must make good use of this moon," he said, "before we go."

"And so must I," said I, laughing as we both went out into the night, he one way and I another, to make our different uses of the moon.

An hour later Colin turned in with a panel that seemed made of moonlight. "How on earth did you do it?" I said. "It is as though you had drawn up the moon in a silver bucket from the bottom of a fairy well."

"No, no," he protested; "I know better. But where is your clair de lune?"

"Nothing doing," I answered.

"Well, then, say those lines you wrote a week or two ago instead."

"'Berries already,' do you mean?"

"Yes."

Here are the lines he meant:

Berries already, September soon,—
The shortening day and ike early moon;
The year is busy with next year's flowers
The seeds are ready for next year' showers;
Through a thousand tossing trees there swells
The sigh of the Summer's sad farewells.
Too soon those leaves in the sunset sky
Low down on the wintry ground will lie,
And grim November and December
Leave naught of Summer to remember—
Saving some flower in a book put by,
Secure from the soft effacing snow,
Though all the rest of the Summer go.

CHAPTER V

THE GREEN FRIEND

Though we had received such unmistakable notice to quit, we still lingered on in our solitude, after the manner of defiant tenants whom nothing short of corporal ejection can dislodge. The North wind began to roar in the tree-tops and shake the doors and windows of the shack, like an angry landlord, but we paid no heed to him. Yet, all the time, both of us, in our several ways, were saying our farewells, and packing up our memories for departure. There was an old elm-tree which Colin had taken for his Summer god, and which he was never tired of painting. He must make the one perfect study of that before we pulled up stakes. So, each day, after our morning adoration of the sun, we would separate about our different ways and business.

The woods were already beginning to wear a wistful, dejected look. There was a feeling of departure everywhere, a sense that the year's excitements were over. The procession had gone by, and there was an empty, purposeless air of waiting-about upon things, a sort of despairing longing for something else to happen—and a sure sense that nothing more could happen till next year. Every event in the floral calendar had taken place with immemorial punctuality and tragic rapidity. All the full-blooded flowers of Summer had long since come and gone, with their magic faces and their souls of perfume. Gone were the banners of blossom from the great trees. The locust and the chestnut, those spendthrifts of the woods, that went the pace so gorgeously in June, are now sober-coated enough, and growing even threadbare. All the hum and the honey and breathless bosom-beat of things is over. The birds sing no more, but only chatter about time-tables. The bee keeps to his hive, and the bewildered butterfly, in tattered ball-dress, wonders what has become of his flowery partners. The great cricket factory has shut down. Not a wheel is heard whirring. The squirrel has lost his playful air, and has an anxious manner, as though there were no time to waste before stocking his granary. Everywhere berries have taken the place of buds, and bearded grasses the place of flowers. Even the goldenrod has fallen to rust, and the stars of the aster are already tarnished. Only along the edges of the wood the dry little paper immortelles spread long shrouds and wreaths in the shade.

Suddenly you feel lonely in the woods, which had seemed so companionable all Summer. What is it—Who is it—that has gone? Though quite alone, there was some one with you all Summer, an invisible being filling the woods with his presence, and always at your side, or somewhere near by. But to-day, through all the green halls and chambers of the wood, you seek him in vain. You call, but there is no answer. You wait, but he does not come. He has gone. The wood is an empty palace. The prince went away secretly in the night. The wood is a deserted temple. The god has betaken himself to some secret abode. Everywhere you come upon chill, abandoned altars, littered debris of Summer sacrifices. Maybe he is dead, and perchance, deeper in the wood, you may come upon his marble form in a winding-sheet of drifting leaves.

Not a god, maybe, you have pictured him, not a prince, but surely as a friend—the mysterious Green Friend of the green silence and the golden hush of Summer noons. The mysterious Green Friend of the woods! So strangely by our side all Summer, so strangely gone away. It is in vain to await him under our morning sycamore, nor under the great maples shall we find him walking, nor amid the alder thickets discover him, nor yet in the little ravine beneath the pines. No! he has surely gone away, and his great house seems empty without him, desolate, filled with lamentation, all its doors and windows open to the Winter snows.

But the Green Friend had left me a message. I found it at the roots of some violets. "I shall be back again next year" he said.

CHAPTER VI

IN THE WAKE OF SUMMER

Yes, it was time to be going, and the thought was much on both our minds. We had as yet, however, made no plans, had not indeed discussed any; but one afternoon, late in September, driven indoors by a sudden squall of rain, I came to Colin with an idea. The night before we had had the first real storm of the season.

"Ah! This will do their business," Colin had said, referring to the trees, as we heard the wind and rain tearing and splashing through the pitch-dark woods. "It will be a different world in the morning."

And indeed it was. Cruel was the work of dismantling that had gone on during the night. The roof of the wood had fallen in in a score of places, letting in the sky through unfamiliar windows; and the distant prospect showed through the torn tapestry of the trees with a startling sense of disclosure. The dishevelled world wore the distressed look of a nymph caught déshabillée. The expression, "the naked woods," occurred to one with almost a sense of impropriety. At least there was a cynical indecorum in this violent disrobing of the landscape.

"Colin," I said, coming to him with my idea. "We've got to go, of course, but I've been thinking—don't you hate the idea of being hurled along in a train, and suddenly shot into the city again, like a package through a tube?"

"Hate it? Don't ask me," said Colin.

"If only it could be more gradual," I went on. "Suppose, for instance, instead of taking the train, we should walk it!"

"Walk to New York?" said Colin, with a