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FALLEN LEAVES

By the sixth of October the leaves generally begin to fall, in
successive showers, after frost or rain; but the principal
leaf-harvest, the acme of the _Fall_, is commonly about the sixteenth.
Some morning at that date there is perhaps a harder frost than we have
seen, and ice formed under the pump, and now, when the morning wind
rises, the leaves come down in denser showers than ever. They suddenly
form thick beds or carpets on the ground, in this gentle air, or even
without wind, just the size and form of the tree above. Some trees, as
small hickories, appear to have dropped their leaves instantaneously,
as a soldier grounds arms at a signal; and those of the hickory,
being bright yellow still, though withered, reflect a blaze of light
from the ground where they lie. Down they have come on all sides, at
the first earnest touch of autumn's wand, making a sound like rain.

Or else it is after moist and rainy weather that we notice how great a
fall of leaves there has been in the night, though it may not yet be
the touch that loosens the rock maple leaf. The streets are thickly
strewn with the trophies, and fallen elm leaves make a dark brown
pavement under our feet. After some remarkably warm Indian-summer day
or days, I perceive that it is the unusual heat which, more than
anything, causes the leaves to fall, there having been, perhaps, no
frost nor rain for some time. The intense heat suddenly ripens and
wilts them, just as it softens and ripens peaches and other fruits,
and causes them to drop.

The leaves of late red maples, still bright, strew the earth, often
crimson-spotted on a yellow ground, like some wild apples,--though
they preserve these bright colors on the ground but a day or two,
especially if it rains. On causeways I go by trees here and there all
bare and smoke-like, having lost their brilliant clothing; but there
it lies, nearly as bright as ever, on the ground on one side, and
making nearly as regular a figure as lately on the tree. I would
rather say that I first observe the trees thus flat on the ground like
a permanent colored shadow, and they suggest to look for the boughs
that bore them. A queen might be proud to walk where these gallant
trees have spread their bright cloaks in the mud. I see wagons roll
over them as a shadow or a reflection, and the drivers heed them just
as little as they did their shadows before.

Birds' nests, in the huckleberry and other shrubs, and in trees, are
already being filled with the withered leaves.
So many have fallen in
the woods that a squirrel cannot run after a falling nut without being
heard. Boys are raking them in the streets, if only for the pleasure
of dealing with such clean, crisp substances. Some sweep the paths
scrupulously neat, and then stand to see the next breath strew them
with new trophies. The swamp floor is thickly covered, and the
_Lycopodium lucidulum_ looks suddenly greener amid them. In dense
woods they half cover pools that are three or four rods long. The
other day I could hardly find a well-known spring, and even suspected
that it had dried up, for it was completely concealed by freshly
fallen leaves; and when I swept them aside and revealed it, it was
like striking the earth, with Aaron's rod, for a new spring. Wet
grounds about the edges of swamps look dry with them. At one swamp,
where I was surveying, thinking to step on a leafy shore from a rail,
I got into the water more than a foot deep.

When I go to the river the day after the principal fall of leaves, the
sixteenth, I find my boat all covered, bottom and seats, with the
leaves of the golden willow under which it is moored, and I set sail
with a cargo of them rustling under my feet. If I empty it, it will be
full again to-morrow. I do not regard them as litter, to be swept out,
but accept them as suitable straw or matting for the bottom of my
carriage. When I turn up into the mouth of the Assabet, which is
wooded, large fleets of leaves are floating on its surface, as it
were getting out to sea, with room to tack; but next the shore, a
little farther up, they are thicker than foam, quite concealing the
water for a rod in width, under and amid the alders, button-bushes,
and maples, still perfectly light and dry, with fibre unrelaxed; and
at a rocky bend where they are met and stopped by the morning wind,
they sometimes form a broad and dense crescent quite across the river.
When I turn my prow that way, and the wave which it makes strikes
them, list what a pleasant rustling from these dry substances getting
on one another! Often it is their undulation only which reveals the
water beneath them. Also every motion of the wood turtle on the shore
is betrayed by their rustling there. Or even in mid-channel, when the
wind rises, I hear them blown with a rustling sound.