17 OCTOBER 1947, Page 17

COUNTRY LIFE

Oust autumn is well sprinkled with little summers—the Indian summer, followed by St. Luke's and St. Martin's—and the last, beginning on Armistice Day, is especially impressed on us. The Indian summer, so- called from experience among the North American Indians, is perhaps even more delectable in the North of the American continent than here. In Newfoundland, as if to celebrate the summer-like quality, a brief close season is interpolated into October, which is the chief mating time of the caribou ; and indeed there as here the likenesses between autumn and spring are many and obvious. A decoration of the season that dis- tinguishes Newfoundland from Britain, at any rate in the South, is the brilliant colouring, not of the trees, but of the berried plants of the bilberry nature and the lowly shrubs, especially currants of sorts. The scene indeed is more suggestive of an English garden than of the wild, where the brilliant leaves of the groundlings are seen almost alongside goldenrod and currants ; and it is only in our gardens that we have any tree or bush that flames into such salience as the Canadian maple.