of my recovering consciousness and hearing the voice of my friend Paulet calling to me from above, and beseeching me to make a sign, if I could not answer him. I was held with my left side downwards, and was able to move my right arm slightly. This motion, which showed him I was not dead, removed his fears, and he called to me in a cheerful tone to keep up my spirits, as they would soon get me out. Directly afterwards I felt somebody was trying to raise me, but I was jammed between the sides of the chasm so tightly, that the force required to drag me out caused me such intense agony, that I became insensible again. Fortunately, while I was in this condition, they succeeded in raising me to the surface; and when I was again sensible, I was lying on my back in the valley. By arranging a portion of their clothing in the manner of a bier, they carried me to a hut without the motion adding very much to the pain caused by my wounds and bruises. I had to lie here for three weeks, swathed in bandages dipped in cold water, before I could move about with tolerable ease; so I think I have good reason to remember my first and last poaching excursion in the wilds of Bavaria.
AUTUMN LEAVES.
At the present season when, turn which way we will, we are so strongly reminded that the year is in its sere and yellow leaf, it is impossible to view these autumn leaves without remembering Mr. Millais’s beautiful picture of their dying grace. And then, because all art tends to call forth solemn emotions, and is not indeed worth the name of art unless it implants in us higher thoughts and calms the world-wearied spirit, we naturally fall into a few serious reflections respecting the withered leaves which strew our path. The first which strikes us is perhaps one which is as old as Homer—that is, coeval with Western civilisation, and as old as the hills on which the trees that furnish the comparison themselves flourish. Just as the generations of men rise and decay, says the poet, so do leaves appear yearly, and wither and perish. We will leave the reader to follow out for himself the inferences to which such a simile must lead, and content ourselves at present with a few remarks on the first clause of it—the defoliation of trees, as botanists term the loss of their leaves.
Although with us it is in autumn that our shrubberies lose their beauty, we are not to suppose such is the case everywhere, or that the same tree drops its leaves simultaneously in all countries. Many trees lose their leaves in spring, and the approach of winter is but a secondary element, so to speak, in the complicated list of causes which seem to operate in the fall of the leaf. In some tropical countries the leaves fall during the dry season which answers to our summer. Again, as the elm, for instance, is earlier in putting forth its leaves at Naples than at Paris, and is some fifteen days earlier there than in England, so it retains them proportionably longer. Balfour informs us that the apple-tree, the fig-tree, the elm, birch, and different kinds of oak, which in Paris lose their leaves in the beginning of November, do not drop them at Naples till the end of December. Of course with us most forest trees are stripped by the end of October.
It is often said that the cause of defoliation in trees arises from a deficiency in the leaves of the power of absorbing moisture. The delicate pores by which the life of the leaf, so to speak, is sustained, and which ought to be vigorously inhaling carbonic acid and giving forth oxygen, alternately receiving and yielding moisture, become clogged, and the leaf fades and falls, just as a human being dies when his respiratory organs cease to act healthily. The diminished light and heat of the shortening days is at the root of this derangement of the leaf’s vigour: but the latent process (as Bacon would have said) which develops itself from the very unfolding of the leaf till it drops from the tree, and acts in subordination to the above causes, is a problem physiology cannot easily explain. However, winter, with its high winds, frosts, and sapping rain, soon practically decides the question, by removing the decaying leaf. The scar left by its withdrawal gradually heals up, and from the axil of the leaf that is gone a bud may be discerned, which will swell through winter and expand in spring into another. Many of the characteristic markings on the stems of palm-trees and tree-ferns are due to the permanence of these scars, where their fronds have decayed and dropped off.
The above remarks only apply to our deciduous trees. Evergreens retain their leaves till those of next season succeed. In the case of evergreen firs, so many varieties of which are to be found in our ornamental grounds, leaves of one, two, and even more seasons, may be observed on the same branch, so exhaustless is Nature in her expedients and resources.
Just as the eye is charmed in spring with observing the different tints of the opening leaves, so in autumn a similar variety of colours may be noticed, one tree varying in shades of the same hue from another of a different kind, even if they do not differ more strikingly in utterly diverse hues. Frost is undoubtedly the chief agent in working those marvels of distant colouring which light up our autumnal woodlands, though with us the effect of such a prospect is said to be as nothing compared with that season in the American woods known as the Indian summer. Still there are few who do not enjoy the pleasant quietness of October’s fortnight of fine weather known as St. Luke’s summer, that lull in which all the characteristics of the three sunny seasons linger awhile about their old haunts, as though unwilling to resign in favour of winter, when
The air is damp, and hush’d, and close,
As a sick man’s room when he taketh repose
As a sick mAn hour before death.
When autumn’s fiery breath has scorched vegetation, and yet, as Wordsworth beautifully expresses it—
Departing summer hath assumed
An aspect tenderly illumed,
The gentlest look of spring;
Unfaded yet prepared to fade.
