A

utumn comes early in Grassy Fordshire. In late September the nights are chill and a white mist hovers ghostly in the moonlight among our hills. The sun dispels it and warms our noons to a summer fervor, but there is no permanence any longer in heat or cold, or leaf or flower—all is change and passing and premonition, so that the singing poet in you must turn philosopher and hush his voice, seeing about him the last sad rites of those little lives once blithe and green as his own was in the spring.

Ere October comes there are crimson stains upon the woodlands. "God's plums, father!" Robin cried, standing as a little boy on Sun Dial and pointing to the distant hills. A spell is over them, a purple and enchanted sleep, though all about them the winds are wakeful, and the sumac fire which blazed up crimson in the sun but a moment gone, burns low in the shadow of white clouds scudding before the gale. Here beneath them the bloom of the golden-rod is upon the land; fieldsful and lanesful, it bars your way, or brushes your shoulders as you pass. Only the asters, white and purple and all hues between, vie here and there with the mightier host, but its yellow plumes nod triumph on every crest, banks and hedgerows glow with its soldiery, it beards the forest, and even where the plough has passed posts its tall sentries at the furrow's brim.

In the lower meadows there is still a coverlet of summer green, but half hidden in the taller, rusting grasses, whose feathery tops ripple in the faintest wind, till suddenly it rises and whips them into waves, now ruddy, now flashing silver, while a foam of daisies beats against the gray stone hedges like waters tumbling on a quay.

There is cheerful fiddling in these dying grasses, and crickets scuttle from beneath your feet; there is other music too—a shrill snoring as of elder fairies oversleeping; startled insects leap upon you, flocks of sparrows flee from interrupted feasts, squirrels berate you, crows spread horrid tales of murder stalking in the fields.

Then leave the uplands—tripping on its hidden creepers; part the briers of the farthest hedgerow, and descend. Down in the valley there is a smell of apples in the air, pumpkins glow among the wigwams of the Indian-corn, and deeper still runs Troublesome among the willows, shining silver in the waning sun. There in the sopping lowlands they are harvesting the last marsh hay. A road leads townward, the vines scarlet on its tumbling walls; the air grows cooler—

"Oh, it is beautiful!" says Letitia, sadly—"but it is fall."

I observe in her always at this season an unusual quietness. She is in the garden as early as in the summer-time, and while it is still dripping with heavy dew, for she clings tenderly to its last flowers—to her nasturtiums, to the morning-glories on the trellis, and the geraniums and dahlias and phlox and verbenas along the path; but she gives her heart to her petunias, and because, she says, they are a homely, old-fashioned flower, whom no one loves any more. As she caresses them, brushing the drops from their plain, sweet faces, she seems, like them, to belong to some by-gone, simpler time. Some think her an odd, quaint figure in her sober gown, but they never knew the girl Letitia, or they would see her still, even in this elder woman with the snow-white hair.

Every fall gypsies camp in the fields near Troublesome on their way southward. It is the same band, Letitia tells me, that has stopped there year after year, and Letitia knows: she used to visit them when she was younger and still had a fortune to be told. It was a weakness we had not suspected. She had never acknowledged a belief in omens or horoscopes, or prophecies by palms or dreams, though she used to say fairies were far more likely than people thought. She had seen glades, she told us, lawn or meadow among encircling trees, where, long after sundown, the daylight lingered in a fairy gloaming; and there, she said, when the fire-flies danced, she had caught such glimpses of that elf-land dear to childhood, she had come to believe in it again. There was such a spot among our maples, and from the steps where we used to sit, we would watch the afterglow pale there to the starlit dusk, or that golden glory of the rising moon break upon the shadowy world, crowning the tree-tops and quenching the eastern stars. Then, sometimes, Dove and Letitia would talk of oracles and divination and other strange inexplicable things which they had heard of, or had known themselves; but Letitia never spoke of the gypsy band till three giggling village maids, half-fearful and half-ashamed of their stealthy quest, found their school-mistress among the vans! She flushed, I suppose, and made the best of a curious matter, for she said, simply, when we charged her with the story that had spread abroad:

"They are English gypsies, and wanderers like the Primroses from their ancient home. That is why they fascinate me, I suppose."

How often she consulted them, or when she began or ceased to do so, I do not know, but when I showed her the vans by the willows and the smoke rising from the fire, last fall, she smiled and said it was like old times to her—but she added, quaintly, that palms did not itch when the veins showed blue.

"Nonsense," I said, "we are both of us young, Letitia. Let us find the crone and hear her croak. I am not afraid of a little sorcery."

Paying no heed to her protestations I turned Pegasus—I have always a Pegasus, whatever my horse's other name—through the meadow-gate. A ragged, brown-faced boy ran out to us and held the bridle while I alighted, and then I turned and offered Letitia a helping hand. She shook her head.

"No, I'll wait here."

"Come," I said, "have you no faith, Letitia?"

"Not any more," she replied. "This is foolishness, Bertram. Will you never grow up?"

"It's only my second-childhood," I explained. "Come, we'll see the vans."

"Some one will see us," she protested.

"There is not a soul on the road," I said.

Shamefacedly she took my hand, glancing uneasily at the highway we had left behind us, and her face flushed as we approached the fire. An ugly old woman with a dirty kerchief about her head, was stirring broth for the evening meal.

"Tripod and kettle," I said. "Do you remember this ancient dame?"

"Yes," said Letitia, "it is—"

"Sibyl," I said. "Her name is Sibyl."

Letitia smiled.

"Do you remember me?" she asked, offering her hand. The old witch peered cunningly into her face, grinning and nodding as if in answer. Two or three scraggy, evil-eyed vagabonds were currying horses and idling about the camp, watching us, but at a glance from the fortune-teller, they slouched streamward. The crone's entreaties and my own were of no avail. Letitia put her hands behind her—but we saw the vans and patted the horses and crossed the woman's palm so that she followed us, beaming and babbling, to the carriage-side. There we were scarcely seated when, stepping forward—so suddenly that I glanced, startled, towards the camp—the gypsy laid a brown hand, strong as a man's, upon the reins; and turning then upon Letitia with a look so grim and mysterious that she grew quite pale beneath those tragic eyes, muttered a jargon of which we made out nothing but the words:

"You are going on a long journey," at which the woman stopped, and taking a backward step, stood there silently and without a smile, gazing upon us till we were gone.

Letitia laughed uneasily as we drove away.

"Did she really remember you?" I asked.

"No, I don't think so—which makes it the more surprising."

"Surprising?"

"Yes; that she should have said again what she always told me."

"And what was that?"

"That I was going on a long journey."

"Did she always tell you that?"

"Always, from the very first."

"Perhaps she tells every one so," I suggested.

"No, for I used to ask, and very particularly, as to that."

Why, I wondered, had she been so curious about long journeys? I had never known travel to absorb her thoughts. Why had she inquired, and always so very particularly, as she confessed, about that single item of gypsy prophecy, and the very one which would seem least likely to be verified? Never in my knowledge of Letitia's lifetime had there been any other promise than that of the fortune-teller that she would ever wander from Grassy Ford. I might have asked her, but she seemed silent and depressed as we drove homeward, which was due, I fancied, to the gypsy's rude alarm. For some days after she continued to remark how strangely that repetition of the old augury had sounded in her ears, and smiling at it, she confessed how in former years she had laid more stress upon it, and had even planned what her gowns would be.

"Did you guess where you were going?" I ventured to inquire.

"Well, I rather hoped—"

"Yes?" I said.

"You know my fondness for history," she continued. "I rather hoped I should see some day what I had read about so long—castles and things—and then, too, there were the novels I was fond of, like Lorna Doone. I always wanted to see the moors and the Doone Valley, and the water-slide that little John Ridd had found so slippery, when he first saw Lorna."

"You wanted to see England then," I said.

"Yes, England," she replied. "England, you know, was my father's country."

"The Doone Valley," I remarked, "would be Devon, wouldn't it?"

"Yes," she replied, "and it was Devon where father was a boy."

"And our old friend Robin Saxeholm came from Devon, you know," I said.

"So he did," she answered. Then we talked of Robin and his visit to Grassy Fordshire years ago, and what Letitia had forgotten of it I recalled to her, and what I could not remember, she supplied, so that it all came back to us like a story or a summer dream.

When she had gone up-stairs I sat for a long time smoking by the dying fire, and musing of some old-time matters which now came back to me in a clearer light. From thinking of my own youth, little by little, I came to Robin's—I mean the younger, who was now so soon to be a man. Tall and fair like the youth he was named for, though not red-haired, he had all but completed that little learning which is a "dangerous thing": he was a high-school senior now, and overwhelmed sometimes with the wonder of it, but a manly fellow for all that, one whom my eyes dwelt fondly on more often than he knew. In the spring-time he would have his parchment; college would follow in the fall—college! What could I do to give my son a broader vision of the universe, lest with only Grassy Ford behind him, he should think the outside world lay mostly within his college walls?

"You are going on a long journey."

The gypsy's words came back unbidden as I rose by the embers of the fire. "A long journey," I repeated; "and why not?"