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.
