THE SPIRIT OF SEPTEMBER.
DISTINCT among all the months of the year, September marks herself chiefly, perhaps, by her rich and lingering silences. The year divides itself into months of sound and stillness, but the silence of September belongs to no other season. In the winter months the mornings do not break to the singing of birds, though there are few days in winter, especially in the glint of sunshine that follows spent winds and rains, on which you cannot hear the thrushes' wild clarions, —perhaps even in January the blackbird's "boxwood flute" will be tuned for a minute or two on warm evenings. As the year goes on to the fullness of spring, the anthem of waking birds grows to a volume of sound incredible to those who have not waked to hear it themselves ; it is an anthem of shouting, indeed, rather than a chorus of song, until broad daylight brings the need for food-hunting and the sheer bard work of filling the mouths of clamorous nestlings. But before July is over the birds' morning anthem has died down to nothing finer than the chatter of waking sparrows and the shaking of the starling's castanets. The cuckoo has "prepared to Ily " ; the swifts no longer chase each other with that strident scream which is of all bird-sounds the most summerlike, unless it be the stick-and-comb "crake-crake" of the landrail, but have withdrawn themselves to high and lonely circles of sunlit air,—too high, you would think, for the tiny insects on which they prey. Of all months in the year, the birds are most silent in August.
Yet the silences of September are richer and deeper. Through all the weeks of August the countryside is humming with the machinery of harvest. Five fields away you can hear the happy whirring of the reaping-machine, and feel in the air the vibrating pulse of the engine that stands dominant in the farmyard. But in September the whirr of the reaping-machine has died down. There is much less corn left standing—perhaps because to-day there is less grown— than in the days when the old squires, gaitered and top-hatted, took out their pointers before the dew was off the ground, on the first day on which partridges might lawfully be shot. The crops that are still ungathered are roots and clover, and the gathering of those does not need the drumming machinery of corn-reaping and threshing. The silence of September, indeed, is a silence of rich possession, of broad surveyance of the ample growth of orchards and wheatfields ; of apple-trees once pink and white with April blossom, and now heavy and drooping with clustered green fruit ; of wide stubbles razed white, and plump stacks in the corner of the field ; of delicate peaches and nectarines, and pumpkins big enough for Cinderella's coaches. There are scents which are proper to all that luxuriance of growth and harvesting ; indeed, nothing marks any of the months more strongly than the memory of the scents which belong to her. For April there is the fresh- ness of primroses, June recalls herself most often by her lilies and sweetbriar, July by the mature sweetness of roses. But to September belongs the scent of sun-warmed blackberries, crimson and purple clusters glowing against dark-green and russet; of broad fields of yellow mustard, humming with the happy work of a million bees ; above all, in the garden walks, the clinging, hot, musty smell of phloxes,—the most autumnal of all scents of flowers ; and blowing over the lawn or down the field from the wood, that faint scent of death which comes first on September winds,—a sharp and bitter scent of leaves and grasses, and cold as with the coldness of water from a very deep well.
There is a morning in the year which could belong to one month only. It breaks silently, as all September mornings break ; but there is a mist floating in the valley which blurs the smaller trees and bushes, and out of which rise the top branches only of the taller trees. With the strength of the sunlight the mist dissolves, leaving the hayfields and lawns drenched white with dew,—a dew which changes from white into sparkling clearness just as a tumbler of ice-cold water clears into transparence on a warm tablecloth. The sky immediately above you deepens into a ring of blue heat, but towards the horizon the blue fades, and there hangs over the level line of distant trees an atmosphere of the most delicate amethystine grey. Once the faintest breath of cold air stirs as you turn the corner of the drive, only to drop away again. It will be one of the hottest days of the year; one of those days on which only the youngest and keenest of shooters is
anxious to tramp turnipfields after lunch, and when, to tire the tramper even .more, the partridges themselves run into hedges and undergrowth, not to be pushed out again except by the most energetic encouragement of thirsty dogs. To some minds, perhaps, it is by one of these hot days of early partridge-shooting that the month marks herself in the memory most clearly ; when the day's work begins with two or three wheels of the line of beaters and guns through a four. acre patch of potatoes, where the thwarting green stems and high, crumbling ridges make it difficult not to stumble, and difficult, too, to get a firm footing when the covey whirrs into the sunlight, and even a couple of shots make the gun-barrels stinging hot to the shooter's left hand. On such a day men like to know that their neighbours are good enough shots to kill dead at any reasonably easy chance, for the birds which alone will be included in the bag are those which have dropped without a flutter. The best dog in the world can do very little with a "runner" when no scent will lie on that dusty soil and dry leaves. The walking up of partridges is, indeed, one of the real old-fashioned sports of September that the changes of a hundred years have barely touched. The stubbles are not so high as they were when the corn was reaped with the sickle, and dogs, except retrievers, are very little used. But it is not true, as some writers would have you believe, that the only sport to be had with partridges is to drive them; and there is a certain satisfaction of sentiment in walking through the quiet fields of clover and minds, with the scent of mustard and wet turnip-leaves coming down wind and the broad leaves of the swedes tipping Hale pools of the night's rain over your boots, and with the brown coveys whirring up before you just as they whirred up before your father, and his father before him.
But is there anywhere out of doors where September separates herself from other months with more distinction than in an English garden ? Out of doors, that is; for there are hymns which belong to the services of country churches which would bring back September into the heart of a countryman who had not heard them for twenty years ; the September sun streaming through dull green windows over piled apples and pumpkins, great loaves of white bread and. straw-bound bundles of wheat and barley, and the congre- gation standing up with a better will than on other days to the opening bar of the harvest hymn. But it is in English gardens, and especially down the broad herbaceous borders which are their great distinction, that the September sunshine falls with peculiar serenity. Earlier in the year, there was scarcely a foot of shadow in the afternoon lying across the grass walks that ran between delphiniums and lupins. To-day the same green paths are bordered with phloxes and Michaelmas daisies, over which red admiral and peacock butterflies flit and glide, settling again and again, and fanning the faces of the flowers with their glowing wings. There is a sense of deep sadness somewhere in the sunlight, and in that most strangely plaintive of all autumn sounds, the short carol of the robin. Perhaps it is a sadness partly born of the knowledge of what the coming months bold; partly, perhaps, it belongs to, and is mixed with, the pleasures of memory of a summer that even now seems at its height, if it were not for the change of colour in the border flowers and the lengthening of the shadows of the phloxes on the shaven aisles of cool green that run between them.
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