The Story of Waitstill Baxter by Kate Douglas Wiggin

IT was not an afternoon for day-dreams, for there was a chill in the air and a gray sky. Only a week before the hills along the river might have been the walls of the New Jerusalem, shining like red gold; now the glory had departed and it was a naked world, with empty nests hanging to boughs that not long ago had been green with summer. The old elm by the tavern, that had been wrapped in a bright trail of scarlet woodbine, was stripped almost bare of its autumn beauty. Here and there a maple showed a remnant of crimson, and a stalwart oak had some rags of russet still clinging to its gaunt boughs. The hickory trees flung out a few yellow flags from the ends of their twigs, but the forests wore a tattered and dishevelled look, and the withered leaves that lay in dried heaps upon the frozen ground, driven hither and thither by every gust of the north wind, gave the unthinking heart a throb of foreboding. Yet the glad summer labor of those same leaves was finished according to the law that governed them, and the fruit was theirs and the seed for the coming year. No breeze had been strong enough to shake them from the tree till they were ready to forsake it. Now they had severed the bond that had held them so tightly and fluttered down to give the earth all their season's earnings. On every hillside, in every valley and glen, the leaves that had made the summer landscape beautiful, lay contentedly:

"Where the rain might rain upon them, Where the sun might shine upon them, Where the wind might sigh upon them, And the snow might die upon them."