Followed, Summer, angry, fidgety, and nervous, with the corn and tobacco to ripen in five short months, the pastures to reclothe, and the fallen leaves to hide away under new carpets.  Suddenly, in the middle of her work, on a stuffy-still July day, she called a wind out of the Northwest, a wind blown under an arch of steel-bellied clouds, a wicked bitter wind with a lacing of hail to it, a wind that came and was gone in less than ten minutes, but blocked the roads with fallen trees, toppled over a barn, and—­blew potatoes out of the ground!  When that was done, a white cloud shaped like a dumb-bell whirled down the valley across the evening blue, roaring and twisting and twisting and roaring all alone by itself.  A West Indian hurricane could not have been quicker on its feet than our little cyclone, and when the house rose a-tiptoe, like a cockerel in act to crow, and a sixty-foot elm went by the board, and that which had been a dusty road became a roaring torrent all in three minutes, we felt that the New England summer had creole blood in her veins.  She went away, red-faced and angry to the last, slamming all the doors of the hills behind her, and Autumn, who is a lady, took charge.

No pen can describe the turning of the leaves—­the insurrection of the tree-people against the waning year.  A little maple began it, flaming blood-red of a sudden where he stood against the dark green of a pine-belt.  Next morning there was an answering signal from the swamp where the sumacs grow.  Three days later, the hill-sides as far as the eye could range were afire, and the roads paved, with crimson and gold.  Then a wet wind blew, and ruined all the uniforms of that gorgeous army; and the oaks, who had held themselves in reserve, buckled on their dull and bronzed cuirasses and stood it out stiffly to the last blown leaf, till nothing remained but pencil-shading of bare boughs, and one could see into the most private heart of the woods.

Frost may be looked for till the middle of May and after the middle of September, so Summer has little time for enamel-work or leaf-embroidery.  Her sisters bring the gifts—­Spring, wind-flowers, Solomon’s-Seal, Dutchman’s-breeches, Quaker-ladies, and trailing arbutus, that smells as divinely as the true May.  Autumn has golden-rod and all the tribe of asters, pink, lilac, and creamy white, by the double armful.  When these go the curtain comes down, and whatever Powers shift the scenery behind, work without noise.  In tropic lands you can hear the play of growth and decay at the back of the night-silences.  Even in England the tides of the winter air have a set and a purpose; but here they are dumb altogether.  The very last piece of bench-work this season was the trailed end of a blackberry-vine, most daringly conventionalised in hammered iron, flung down on the frosty grass an instant before people came to look.  The blue bloom of the furnace was still dying along the central rib, and the side-sprays were cherry red, even as they had been lifted from the charcoal.  It was a detail, evidently, of some invisible gate in the woods; but we never found that workman, though he had left the mark of his cloven foot as plainly as any strayed deer.  In a week the heavy frosts with scythes and hammers had slashed and knocked down all the road-side growth and the kindly bushes that veil the drop off the unfenced track.