The dull colors of English autumnal foliage, give you no conception of this marvellous phenomenon. The change here, too, is gradual. In America it is the work of a night--of a single frost! Ah, to have seen the sun set on hills, bright in the still green and lingering summer, and to wake in the morning to a spectacle like this! It is as if a myriad of rainbows were laced through the tree-tops--as if the sunsets of a summer--gold, purple and crimson--had been fused in the alembic of the west, and poured back in a new deluge of light and color over the wilderness. It is as if every leaf in those countless trees had been painted to outflush the tulip--as if, by some electric miracle, the dies of the earth's heart had struck upward, and her crystals and ore, her sapphires, hyacinths and rubies, had let forth their imprisoned dies to mount through the roots of the forest, and like the angels that in olden time entered the bodies of the dying, reanimate the perishing leaves, and revel an hour in their bravery.
I was sitting by the companion-ladder, thinking to what on earth these masses of foliage could be resembled, when a dog sprang upon my knees, and, the moment after, a hand was laid on my shoulder.
I looked at him with astonishment. The _soigne_ man of fashion I had once known, was enveloped in a kind of hunter's frock, loose and large, and girded to his waist by a belt; his hat was exchanged for a cap of rich otter-skin; his pantaloons spread with a slovenly carelessness over his feet, and altogether there was that in his air which told me at a glance that he had renounced the world. Last had recovered his leanness, and after wagging out his joy, he couched between my feet, and lay looking into my face as if he was brooding over the more idle days in which we had been acquainted.
"And where are _you_ bound?" I asked, having answered the same question for myself.
I could not forbear an exclamation of surprise.
"You would wonder less," said he, with an impatient gesture, "if you knew more of me. And by the way," he added, with a smile, "I think I never told you the first half of the story--my life up to the time I met you."
"It was not for the want of a catechist," I answered, setting myself in an attitude of attention.