There can be nothing sadder than the solemn hush of nature that precedes
the death of the year. The golden glory of autumn, with the billowy
bronze and velvet azure of the skies above the royal robes of oak and
maple, bespeak the closing hours of nature's teeming life and the silent
farewell to humanity's gauze underwear.
Thus while nature dons her regal robe of scarlet and gold in honor of
the farewell benefit to autumn, the sad-eyed poet hies away to a
neighboring clothes line, and the hour of nature's grand blowout dons
the flaming flannels of his friend out of respect for the hectic flush
of the dying year.
Leaves have their time to fall, and so has the price of coal. And yet
how sadly at variance with decaying nature is the robust coal market.
Another glorious summer with its wealth of pleasant memories is stored
away among the archives of our history. Another gloomy winter is upon
us. These wonderful colors that flame across the softened sky of Indian
summer like the gory banner of royal conqueror, come but to warn us that
in a few short weeks the water pipe will be bursted in the kitchen and
the decorated washbowl be broken.
We flit through the dreamy hours of summer like swift-winged bumble bees
amid the honeysuckle and pumpkin blossoms, storing away, perhaps, a
little glucose honey and buckwheat pancakes for the future, but all at
once, like a newspaper thief in the night, the king of frost and ripe
mellow chilblains is upon us, and we crouch beneath the wintry blast and
hump our spinal column up into the crisp air like a Texas steer that has
thoughtlessly swallowed a raw cactus.
Life is one continued round of alternative joys and sorrows. To-day we
are on the top wave of prosperity and warming ourselves in the glad
sunlight of plenty, and to-morrow we are cast down and depressed
financially, and have to stand off the washer-woman for our clean shirt
or stay at home from the opera.
The November sky already frowns down upon us, and its frozen tears begin
to fall. The little birds have hushed their little lay. So has the
fatigued hen. Only a little while, and the yawning chasm in the cold,
calm features of the Thanksgiving turkey will be filled with voluptuous
stuffing and then sewed up. The florid features of the polygamous
gobbler will be wrapped in sadness, and cranberry pie will be a burden,
for the veal cutlet goeth to its long home, and the ice cream freezer is
broken in the woodhouse.
Oh, time! thou baldheaded pelican with the venerable corncutter and the
second hand hour-glass, thou playest strange pranks upon the children of
men. No one would think, to look at thy bilious countenance and store
teeth, that in thy bony bosom lurked such eccentric schemes.
The chubby boy, whose danger signal hangs sadly through the lattice-work
of his pants, knows that Time, who waits for no man, will one day, if we
struggle heroically on, give him knowledge and suspenders, and a solid
girl, and experience and soft white mustache and eventually a low grave
in the valley beneath the sighing elms and the weeping willow, where, in
the misty twilight of the year, noiselessly upon his breast shall fall
the deaf leaf, while the silent tear of the gray autumnal sky will come
and sink into the yellow grass above his head.