CHAPTER XXVIII . THE PATH TO ARCADY October that year gathered up all the spilled sunshine of the summer and clad herself in it as in a garment . The Story Girl had asked us to try to make the last month together beautiful , and Nature seconded our efforts , giving us that most beautiful of beautiful things -- a gracious and perfect moon of falling leaves . There was not in all that vanished October one day that did not come in with auroral splendour and go out attended by a fair galaxy of evening stars -- not a day when there were not golden lights in the wide pastures and purple hazes in the ripened distances . Never was anything so gorgeous as the maple trees that year . Maples are trees that have primeval fire in their souls . It glows out a little in their early youth , before the leaves open , in the redness and rosy-yellowness of their blossoms , but in summer it is carefully hidden under a demure , silver-lined greenness . Then when autumn comes , the maples give up trying to be sober and flame out in all the barbaric splendour and gorgeousness of their real nature , making of the hills things out of an Arabian Nights dream in the golden prime of good Haroun Alraschid . You may never know what scarlet and crimson really are until you see them in their perfection on an October hillside , under the unfathomable blue of an autumn sky . All the glow and radiance and joy at earth 's heart seem to have broken loose in a splendid determination to express itself for once before the frost of winter chills her beating pulses . It is the year 's carnival ere the dull Lenten days of leafless valleys and penitential mists come . The time of apple-picking had come around once more and we worked joyously . Uncle Blair picked apples with us , and between him and the Story Girl it was an October never to be forgotten . `` Will you go far afield for a walk with me to-day ? '' he said to her and me , one idle afternoon of opal skies , pied meadows and misty hills . It was Saturday and Peter had gone home ; Felix and Dan were helping Uncle Alec top turnips ; Cecily and Felicity were making cookies for Sunday , so the Story Girl and I were alone in Uncle Stephen 's Walk . We liked to be alone together that last month , to think the long , long thoughts of youth and talk about our futures . There had grown up between us that summer a bond of sympathy that did not exist between us and the others . We were older than they -- the Story Girl was fifteen and I was nearly that ; and all at once it seemed as if we were immeasurably older than the rest , and possessed of dreams and visions and forward-reaching hopes which they could not possibly share or understand . At times we were still children , still interested in childish things .
But there came hours when we seemed to our two selves very grown up and old , and in those hours we talked our XXXXX and visions and hopes , vague and splendid , as all such are , over together , and so began to build up , out of the rainbow fragments of our childhood 's companionship , that rare and beautiful friendship which was to last all our lives , enriching and enstarring them .
autumn blossoms dreams garment glow maples mists nature rest turnips