By SHERWOOD ANDERSON

(From _The Bookman_)


I am at my house in the country and it is late October. It rains. Back
of my house is a forest and in front there is a road and beyond that
open fields. The country is one of low hills, flattening suddenly into
plains. Some twenty miles away, across the flat country, lies the huge
city, Chicago.

On this rainy day the leaves of the trees that line the road before my
window are falling like rain, the yellow, red, and golden leaves fall
straight down heavily. The rain beats them brutally down. They are
denied a last golden flash across the sky. In October leaves should be
carried away, out over the plains, in a wind. They should go dancing
away.

Yesterday morning I arose at daybreak and went for a walk. There was a
heavy fog and I lost myself in it. I went down into the plains and
returned to the hills and everywhere the fog was as a wall before me.
Out of it trees sprang suddenly, grotesquely, as in a city street late
at night people come suddenly out of the darkness into the circle of
light under a street lamp. Above there was the light of day forcing
itself slowly into the fog. The fog moved slowly. The tops of trees
moved slowly. Under the trees the fog was dense, purple. It was like
smoke lying in the streets of a factory town.

An old man came up to me in the fog. I know him well. The people here