This halcyon period of our autumn will always in some way be associated with the Indian.  It is red and yellow and dusky like him.  The smoke of his camp-fire seems again in the air.  The memory of him pervades the woods.  His plumes and moccasins and blanket of skins form just the costume the season demands.  It was doubtless his chosen period.  The gods smiled upon him then if ever.  The time of the chase, the season of the buck and the doe, and of the ripening of all forest fruits; the time when all men are incipient hunters, when the first frosts have given pungency to the air, when to be abroad on the hills or in the woods is a delight that both old and young feel,—­if the red aborigine ever had his summer of fullness and contentment, it must have been at this season, and it fitly bears his name.

In how many respects fall imitates or parodies the spring!  It is indeed, in some of its features, a sort of second youth of the year.  Things emerge and become conspicuous again.  The trees attract all eyes as in May.  The birds come forth from their summer privacy and parody their spring reunions and rivalries; some of them sing a little after a silence of months.  The robins, bluebirds, meadowlarks, sparrows, crows, all sport, and call, and behave in a manner suggestive of spring.  The cock grouse drums in the woods as he did in April and May.  The pigeons reappear, and the wild geese and ducks.  The witch-hazel blooms.  The trout spawns.  The streams are again full.  The air is humid, and the moisture rises in the ground.  Nature is breaking camp, as in spring she was going into camp.  The spring yearning and restlessness is represented in one by the increased desire to travel.

Spring is the inspiration, fall the expiration.  Both seasons have their equinoxes, both their filmy, hazy air, their ruddy forest tints, their cold rains, their drenching fogs, their mystic moons; both have the same solar light and warmth, the same rays of the sun; yet, after all, how different the feelings which they inspire!  One is the morning, the other the evening; one is youth, the other is age.

The difference is not merely in us; there is a subtle difference in the air, and in the influences that emanate upon us from the dumb forms of nature.  All the senses report a difference.  The sun seems to have burned out.  One recalls the notion of Herodotus that he is grown feeble, and retreats to the south because he can no longer face the cold and the storms from the north.  There is a growing potency about his beams in spring, a waning splendor about them in fall.  One is the kindling fire, the other the subsiding flame.