till far into May, but neither the season nor the flowers took any note
of them, and, before we were well sure Winter had gone, the lackeys of
my Lord Baltimore in their new liveries came to tell us that Summer was
in the valley, and please might they nest at the bottom of the garden?

Followed, Summer, angry, fidgety, and nervous, with the corn and tobacco
to ripen in five short months, the pastures to reclothe, and the fallen
leaves to hide away under new carpets. Suddenly, in the middle of her
work, on a stuffy-still July day, she called a wind out of the
Northwest, a wind blown under an arch of steel-bellied clouds, a wicked
bitter wind with a lacing of hail to it, a wind that came and was gone
in less than ten minutes, but blocked the roads with fallen trees,
toppled over a barn, and--blew potatoes out of the ground! When that was
done, a white cloud shaped like a dumb-bell whirled down the valley
across the evening blue, roaring and twisting and twisting and roaring
all alone by itself. A West Indian hurricane could not have been quicker
on its feet than our little cyclone, and when the house rose a-tiptoe,
like a cockerel in act to crow, and a sixty-foot elm went by the board,
and that which had been a dusty road became a roaring torrent all in
three minutes, we felt that the New England summer had creole blood in
her veins. She went away, red-faced and angry to the last, slamming all
the doors of the hills behind her, and Autumn, who is a lady, took
charge.

No pen can describe the turning of the leaves--the insurrection of the
tree-people against the waning year. A little maple began it, flaming
blood-red of a sudden where he stood against the dark green of a
pine-belt. Next morning there was an answering signal from the swamp
where the sumacs grow. Three days later, the hill-sides as far as the
eye could range were afire, and the roads paved, with crimson and gold.