Evening star., 1930-10-30
NATURE IN AUTUMN


| passes in the walls Hoptoads, moles,
homeless cats, are among the chilled,
hungry little waits who drew near, in
! trembling, TO the shelter of our abodes.
And now, in the cellars and attics and
partitions, the mice begin to run.
| hear them nibbling and scampering
when I lie awake and the night wind
rises. sharp and unkindly. They re-
mind me rather pathetically' of apart
ment dwellers on moving day, rushing
to take leases, with a fine flourish
of packers and movers, and much call
ing up and down stairs and out OF
windows. Alas. they do such damage,
there soft, swift little rodents, that /
shall be obliged to defend myself
against them. and with cruel traps and
crueler poisons (since they elude all
other methods) shall. in my tyranny,
encompass their deaths.
Autumn Grains.
Even the Puritan fathers, who came
to this, our New World, with their
minds looking back to the Old, per-
ceived that there was in our American
Autumn a something more sprigptly
than any English Autumn, some. some
thing sumptuous, mellow and bright,
and so they made a great feast tWasnt
it 1920 in honor of the first good
harvest in the hard, new land. II
nv memory serves me rightly from my
school books, the menu of that first
strain on the American digestion con-
sisted of wild turkey. squash, 1ndlah
corn, pumpkins, mince pies and cram
berry sauce. The last two may have
been known in Old England. But the
corn and the pumpkins and squash
were Indian foods, and the turkey,
almost identical with the barnyard bird
of today. was wild in the woods.
Since that first Thanksgiving feast,
the poor wild dlrkey has Jared lar
worse than the Indian who used TO
hunt him. 1t is a characteristic OF
American pioneer histor" thai every
wild resource ie wasted III thougntless
consumption: tn" turkey WAS perhapS
the first victim; IT, y. as wild bro,
he survives in "a l.~ tracts OF the
Southwest. Even so he has not suffered
the fate of the passenger pigeon, which
Is utterly extinct We now feed, preeo
and protect master gobbler.
For some reason cannot logically
Justify, would rather eat domestic
turkey than little wild thrush, sucn
as lies in every European market stall,
these Autumn days.
It is otherwise with corn, that mar
velous golden cereal, the Red Mans
greatest gift tC humanity. Fortunately
for that species of vegetable called by
botanists Zea Mays, 1t has circulated
as freely as if it had been the purest
gold. Carefully man has borne its
seeds around the world, and far has 1t
travelled from it's ancestral home
which was probably Mexico. There is
nothing so fascinating as the origins
of our most precious plants, and the
elusive fact is that, in most cases,
their origins cannot be discovered,
though it would seem at first glance
that nothing ought to be easier.
But the wild ancestor of wheat has
never been found And nobody yet has
discovered the wild ancestor of the corn
that you will nibble. piping hot, on
THANKSGIVING day. Burbank thought
he had found it-or had evolved it out
of teosinte grass-but his plant was
hybrid between teosinte grass and
corn Where did the Red Man hnd
the working materials from which the
kingliest of cur Autumn harvest grains
was bred, selected and evolved?
Forces Of Decay.
The harvest is gathered-wheat and
corn and apple and pear, pumpkin and
squash and gourd. There have been
places where the harvest was a bitter
disappointment. History, alas, shows
innumerable agricultural disasters; but
in the end they all heal: better years
come around, in the slowly wheeling OF
the cycles. Now the trees stand bare.
The farmwife's currant bushes by the
driveway, too are leafless. In the
woods, the wild fruits drop their pits
and seeds; the stems of the wild flowers
die back to the roots: the wind will
break them, the rains will rot them, and
in the end the forces Of decay will take
them.
The word decay sounds repulsive. yet
the ruinous traces of the forces of de-
cay are in themselves sort of wild
harvest that comes after man has
plucked the fruits and threshed the
grain. The tiny seeds of destruction,
the spores of mold, the fungus threads
that bind and suck, the fiery spots of
rust, are foes If they fall too soon upon
the plants we tend But If they come
as they usually do, with the punctuality
of the migrating birds, We owe them
thankful thought which Is rarely be-
slowed on them.
Think what the surface of our earth
would soon be like but for these very
Lilliputian sweepers, cleaners and