E-text prepared by Brendan Lane, Mary Meehan, and the Project Gutenberg
Online Distributed Proofreading Team
1911
I The Epitaph of Summer
II At Evening I Came to the Wood
III "Trespassers will be …"
IV Salad and Moonshine
V The Green Friend
VI In the Wake of Summer
VII Maps and Farewells
VIII The American Bluebird and Its Song
IX Dutch Hollow
X Where They Sing from Morning Till Night
XI Apple-Land
XII Orchards and a Line from Virgil
XIII Fellow Wayfarers
XIV The Old Lady of the Walnuts and Others
XV The Man at Dansville
XVI In which we Catch up with Summer
XVII Containing Valuable Statistics
XVIII A Dithyrambus of Buttermilk
XIX A Growl about American Country Hotels
XX Onions, Pigs and Hickory-nuts
XXI October Roses and a Young Girl's Face
XXII Concerning the Popular Taste in Scenery and some Happy People
XXIII The Susquehanna
XXIV And Unexpectedly the Last
Envoi
As I started out from the farm with a basket of potatoes, for our supperin the shack half a mile up the hillside, where we had made our Summercamp, my eye fell on a notice affixed to a gate-post, and, as I read it,my heart sank—sank as the sun was sinking yonder with wistful glorybehind the purple ridge. I tore the paper from the gate-post and put itin my pocket with a sigh.
"It is true, then," I said to myself. "We have got to admit it. I mustshow this to Colin."
Then I continued my way across the empty, close-gleaned corn-field,across the railway track, and, plunging into the orchard on the otherside, where here and there among the trees the torrents of apples werebeing already caught in boxes by the thrifty husbandman, began to breastthe hill intersected with thickly wooded watercourses.
High up somewhere amid the cloud of beeches and buttonwood trees, our logcabin lay hid, in a gully made by the little stream that filled our pailswith a silver trickle over a staircase of shelving rock, and up thereColin was already busy with his skilled French cookery, preparing ourevening meal. The woods still made a pompous show of leaves, but I knewit to be a hollow sham, a mask of foliage soon to be stripped off byequinoctial fury, a precarious stage-setting, ready to be blown down atthe first gusts from the north. A forlorn bird here and there made a thinpiping, as it flitted homelessly amid the bleached long grasses, and thefrail silk of the milkweed pods came floating along ghostlike on theevening breeze.
Yes! It was true. Summer was beginning to pack up, the greatstage-carpenter was about to change the scene, and the great theatre wasfull of echoes and sighs and sounds of farewell. Of course, we had knownit for some time, but had not had the heart to admit it to each other,could not find courage to say that one more golden Summer was at an end.But the paper I had torn from the roadside left us no further shred ofillusion. There was an authoritative announcement there was no blinking,a notice to quit there was no gain-saying.
As I came to the crest of the hill, and in sight of the shack, shiningwith early lamp-light deep down among the trees of the gully, I could seeColin innocently at work on a salad, and hear him humming to himself hiseternal "Vive le Capitaine.