“For beautiful variety no crop can be compared with this. Here is not merely the plain yellow of the grains, but nearly all the colors that we know, the brightest blue not excepted: the early blushing maple, the poison sumach blazing its sins as scarlet, the mulberry ash, the rich chromeyellow of the poplars, the brilliant red huckleberry, withwhich the hills' backs are painted, like those of sheep. The frost touches them, and, with the slightest breath of returning day or jarring of earth's axle, see in what showers they come floating down! The ground is all parti-colored with them. Butthey still live in the soil, whose fertility and bulk they increase, and in the forests that spring from it. They stoop to rise, to mount higherin coming years, by subtle chemistry, climbing by the sap in the trees; and the sapling's first fruits thus shed,transmuted at last, may adornits crown, when, in after years, it has become the monarch of the forest.”
