Rain fell at times, but not heavily at
first, and a thirsty world drank open-mouthed through deep sun-cracks in
field and moor and dried-up marsh. But bedraggled autumn's robes were soon
washed colorless; the heath turned pallid before it faded to sere brown;
rotten banks of decaying leaves rose high under the hedges. There was no
dry, crisp whirl of gold on the wind, but a sodden condition gradually
overspread the land. The earth grew drunken with the later rains and could
hold no more. October saw the last of the purple and crimson, the tawny
browns and royal yellows. Only beeches, their wet leaves by many shades a
darker auburn than is customary, still retained lower foliage. The trees
put on their winter shapes unduly early. The world was dark and sweated
fungus. Uncouth children of the earth, whose hour is that which sees the
leaf fall, sprang into short-lived being. Black goblins and gray, white
goblins and brown, spread weird life abroad. With fleshy gills, squat and
lean, fat and thin, bursting through the grass in companies and circles,
lurking livid, gigantic and alone on the trunks of forest trees, gemming
the rotten bough with crimson, twinkling like topaz on the crooked stems of
the furze, battening upon death, rising into transitory vigor from the rack
and rot of a festering earth, they flourished. Heavy mists now stretched
their draperies over the high lands; and exhalations from the corpse of the
summer hung bluish under the rain in the valleys.
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