Evening Republican, Volume 23, Number 14, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 15 January 1920 — EVERYWHERE SIGNS OF FALL [ARTICLE]

EVERYWHERE SIGNS OF FALL

Sights and Sounds That Meet the Eyes and Ears In the Year's Closing Season. z Fall! and everywhere the sights and sounds of falling. In the woods, through the cool, silvery air, the leaves, so indispensable once, so useless now. Bright day after bright day, dripping night after dripping night, the neverendipg filtering or gusty fall of leaves. The fall of walnuts, dropping from bare boughs with muffled boom Into the deep grass. 1 The fall of the hickory-nut, rattling noisily down through the scaly limbs and scattering its hull among the stones of the brook below. The fall of buckeyes, rolling like balls of mahogany Into the little dust paths made by the sheep when they sought those roofs of leaves. The Jail of acorns, leaping out of their matted green cups as they strike the earth. The fall of red haw, persimmon and pawpaw, and the odorous wild plum in its valley thickets. The fall of all seeds whatsoever in the forest, now made ripe in their high places and sent back to the ground, there to be folded In against the time When they shall rise again as the living generations, the homing, downward flight of the seeds In the many-colored weeds all over the quiet land. —James Lane Allen, in “Reign of Law.”