across the railway track, and, plunging into the orchard on the other
side, where here and there among the trees the torrents of apples were
being already caught in boxes by the thrifty husbandman, began to breast
the hill intersected with thickly wooded watercourses.

High up somewhere amid the cloud of beeches and buttonwood trees, our log
cabin lay hid, in a gully made by the little stream that filled our pails
with a silver trickle over a staircase of shelving rock, and up there
Colin was already busy with his skilled French cookery, preparing our
evening meal. The woods still made a pompous show of leaves, but I knew
it to be a hollow sham, a mask of foliage soon to be stripped off by
equinoctial fury, a precarious stage-setting, ready to be blown down at
the first gusts from the north. A forlorn bird here and there made a thin
piping, as it flitted homelessly amid the bleached long grasses, and the
frail silk of the milkweed pods came floating along ghostlike on the
evening breeze.

Yes! It was true. Summer was beginning to pack up, the great
stage-carpenter was about to change the scene, and the great theatre was
full of echoes and sighs and sounds of farewell. Of course, we had known
it for some time, but had not had the heart to admit it to each other,
could not find courage to say that one more golden Summer was at an end.
But the paper I had torn from the roadside left us no further shred of
illusion. There was an authoritative announcement there was no blinking,
a notice to quit there was no gain-saying.

As I came to the crest of the hill, and in sight of the shack, shining
with early lamp-light deep down among the trees of the gully, I could see
Colin innocently at work on a salad, and hear him humming to himself his
eternal "_Vive le Capitaine_."