Sometimes, though rarely with the white pine, more often with the fir and spruce, two will compete with equal success for this lost leadership and you have a tree with twin tops. Usually, however, one fails in the race and the stronger goes ahead alone.
So, going abroad these keen November days, looking upon the world stripped of the glamour of summer and the glory of autumn fruitage, we see it by no means a dead and pulseless thing to be wept over and buried. Instead, we wonder at and delight in the riot of life laid bare by the passing of leaf and fruit. The woodland is more beautiful, the pasture more enticing than ever. Beauty thus unadorned is adorned the most, and we forget to sorrow over the ceasing of this year’s growth in our joy in the promise of that for the year to be.
Last night the world was all soft with mist. Over on the brow of Cemetery Hill you looked off into an illimitable distance of it. Horizon after horizon loomed over the shoulder of its fellows as the gray-draped hills rose one beyond the other and tiptoed softly away into the yonder world,--so softly that you could not tell where the earth ended and the heavens began.
The landscape passed like an elder saint from this world to the next, you could scarce tell when, only that you were awed and soothed with the soft serenity of the going. In the hush that followed the soft blue mists changed their draperies for black, in mourning for the passing of the twilight saint, and thus night came.
Last summer night on this hilltop was filled with voices. A million insects chirped and sang. Tree toads trilled, amorous toads played bagpipes all along the margin of the swamp below, and in deeper water a thousand frogs shouted one to another in guttural diapason. A little screech owl used to sit in the darker corner of the pines and ululate all to himself far into the night, and here and there a songbird, stirring in his sleep, would pipe a mellow note. A coon would whinny or a fox would yap, and there were many other sounds whose source you might not surely define. The forefathers who wait serenely beneath their slate headstones all along the brow of the hill had much and pleasant company when the year was in its prime. Now their nights are as silent as if the world itself were dead, their company ghosts of mist as tenuous as their own.