Orde departed for the woods to start the cutting
as soon as the first belated snow should fall.
This condition seemed, however, to delay. During each night it grew
cold. The leaves, after their blaze and riot of colour, turned
crisp and crackly and brown. Some of the little, still puddles were
filmed with what was almost, but not quite ice. A sheen of frost
whitened the house roofs and silvered each separate blade of grass
on the lawns. But by noon the sun, rising red in the veil of smoke
that hung low in the snappy air, had mellowed the atmosphere until
it lay on the cheek like a caress. No breath of wind stirred.
Sounds came clearly from a distance. Long V-shaped flights of geese
swept athwart the sky, very high up, but their honking came faintly
to the ear. And yet, when the sun, swollen to the great dimensions
of the rising moon, dipped blood-red through the haze; the first
premonitory tingle of cold warned one that the grateful warmth of
the day had been but an illusion of a season that had gone. This
was not summer, but, in the quaint old phrase, Indian summer, and
its end would be as though the necromancer had waved his wand.
To Newmark, sitting at his desk, reported Captain Floyd of the steam
barge NORTH STAR.
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