In October no region in the North has a monopoly of beauty, but there is a certain refinement, or it may be a repose, in the Berkshire Hills which is in a manner typical of a distinct phase of American fashion.  There is here a note of country life, of retirement, suggestive of the old-fashioned “country-seat.”  It is differentiated from the caravansary or the cottage life in the great watering-places.  Perhaps it expresses in a sincerer way an innate love of rural existence.  Perhaps it is only a whim of fashion.  Whatever it may be, there is here a moment of pause, a pensive air of the closing scene.  The estates are ample, farms in fact, with a sort of villa and park character, woods, pastures, meadows.  When the leaves turn crimson and brown and yellow, and the frequent lakes reflect the tender sky and the glory of the autumn foliage, there is much driving over the hills from country place to country place; there are lawn-tennis parties on the high lawns, whence the players in the pauses of the game can look over vast areas of lovely country; there are open-air fetes, chance meetings at the clubhouse, chats on the highway, walking excursions, leisurely dinners.  In this atmosphere one is on the lookout for an engagement, and a wedding here has a certain eclat.  When one speaks of Great Barrington or Stockbridge or Lenox in the autumn, a certain idea of social position is conveyed.

Did Their Pilgrimage end on these autumn heights?  To one of them, I know, the colored landscape, the dreamy atmosphere, the unique glory that comes in October days, were only ecstatic suggestions of the life that opened before her.  Love is victorious over any mood of nature, even when exquisite beauty is used to heighten the pathos of decay.  Irene raved about the scenery.  There is no place in the world beautiful enough to have justified her enthusiasm, and there is none ugly enough to have killed it.

I do not say that Irene’s letters to Mr. King were entirely taken up with descriptions of the beauty of Lenox.  That young gentleman had gone on business to Georgia.  Mr. and Mrs. Benson were in Cyrusville.  Irene was staying with Mrs. Farquhar at the house of a friend.  These letters had a great deal of Lovers’ Latin in them—­enough to have admitted the writer into Yale College if this were a qualification.  The letters she received were equally learned, and the fragments Mrs. Farquhar was permitted to hear were so interrupted by these cabalistic expressions that she finally begged to be excused.  She said she did not doubt that to be in love was a liberal education, but pedantry was uninteresting.  Latin might be convenient at this stage; but later on, for little tiffs and reconciliations, French would be much more useful.

One of these letters southward described a wedding.  The principals in it were unknown to King, but in the minute detail of the letter there was a personal flavor which charmed him.  He would have been still more charmed could he have seen the girl’s radiant face as she dashed it off.  Mrs. Farquhar watched her with a pensive interest awhile, went behind her chair, and, leaning over, kissed her forehead, and then with slow step and sad eyes passed out to the piazza, and stood with her face to the valley and the purple hills.  But it was a faded landscape she saw.