bright red or yellow cheek.  They are wet with dew, these little apples, and a black ant runs anxiously over them when you turn them round and round to see where the best place is to bite.  There will almost always be a bird’s nest in the tree, and it is most likely to be a robin’s nest.  The prehistoric robins must have been cave dwellers, for they still make their nests as much like cellars as they can, though they follow the new fashion and build them aloft.  One always has a thought of spring at the sight of a robin’s nest.  It is so little while ago that it was spring, and we were so glad to have the birds come back, and the life of the new year was just showing itself; we were looking forward to so much growth and to the realization and perfection of so many things.  I think the sadness of autumn, or the pathos of it, is like that of elderly people.  We have seen how the flowers looked when they bloomed and have eaten the fruit when it was ripe; the questions have had their answer, the days we waited for have come and gone.  Everything has stopped growing.  And so the children have grown to be men and women, their lives have been lived, the autumn has come.  We have seen what our lives would be like when we were older; success or disappointment, it is all over at any rate.  Yet it only makes one sad to think it is autumn with the flowers or with one’s own life, when one forgets that always and always there will be the spring again.

I am very fond of walking between the roads.  One grows so familiar with the highways themselves.  But once leap the fence and there are a hundred roads that you can take, each with its own scenery and entertainment.  Every walk of this kind proves itself a tour of exploration and discovery, and the fields of my own town, which I think I know so well, are always new fields.  I find new ways to go, new sights to see, new friends among the things that grow, and new treasures and pleasures every summer; and later, when the frosts have come and the swamps have frozen, I can go everywhere I like all over my world.

That afternoon I found something I had never seen before—­a little grave alone in a wide pasture which had once been a field.  The nearest house was at least two miles away, but by hunting for it I found a very old cellar, where the child’s home used to be, not very far off, along the slope.  It must have been a great many years ago that the house had stood there; and the small slate head-stone was worn away by the rain and wind, so there was nothing to be read, if indeed there had ever been any letters on it.  It had looked many a storm in the face, and many a red sunset.  I suppose the woods near by had grown and been cut, and grown again, since it was put there.  There was an old sweet-brier bush growing on the short little grave, and in the grass underneath I found a ground-sparrow’s nest.  It was like a little neighborhood, and I have felt ever since as if I belonged to it; and I