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.  And yet but a week ago, rhododendrons at New Athos, wild roses and mallow in full bloom at Gudaout, acres of saffron hollyhocks, and evening primroses at Sotchi!

I had entered an exposed country, colder than much of the land that lay far to the north.

Two days later the clouds moved away, the zenith cleared, and after it the whole sky, and then along the west and the south, as far as eye could see, was a great snow-field, mountain after mountain, and slope after slope all white to the sky.  A cold wind, as of January, blew keenly from the snow, and even froze the puddles on the road.  It seemed we had journeyed thus suddenly not only to autumn, but to winter itself.

But at noon the sun was hot again.  The new-born brimstone butterflies were upon the wing, a flutter of lambent green.  They were of the time, and young.  They must live all winter and waken every sunny day till next spring—­the ambassadors of this summer to the next.

All that belongs to the past is tired, and even at the bidding of the sun insect life is loth to rise.  The grasshopper is tired, the dragon-fly loves to crouch among the shadows, the summer-worsted fritillary butterflies pick themselves out of their resting-places to flutter a little further; their wings, once thick with yellow down and shapely, are now all broken, transparent, ragged.

The tramp’s summer also is over.  He will not lie full length in the sun till the spring comes round again.  For the ground is wet, and the cold is searching.  I walked more miles in the cold fortnight that took me to Batoum than in a whole month before New Athos.  There was in the air a sting “that bids nor sit nor stand, but go.”

Yet thoughts were plentiful, and many memories of past autumns came back to me.  How many are the rich, melancholy afternoons of late October or early November, golden afternoons that occur year after year, when one feels one’s thoughts parting from the mind easily and plentifully without urging, as overripe fruit falling at last since no one has grasped it before.

I hurried along the road, full of sad thoughts.  The year was growing to be an old man.  It looked back at spring, at the early days when it first felt the promises of life’s glory and scarcely dared believe them true, at laughing May, at wide and spacious June, and then the turning of the year.

It almost seemed to me that I had grown old with the year, that I had even gathered in my fruits, as indeed I had, only they were more the year’s fruits than mine:  I had been the guest of the year.