Sinopsis

In the morning the trees stood perfectly still: yellow, yellowish-green, crimson, russet. Not a pulse of air stirred their stricken foliage, but the leaves left the spray and dripped silently, vertically down, with a faint, ticking sound. They fell like the tears of a grief which is too inward for any other outward sign; an absent grief, almost self-forgetful. By-and-by, softly, very softly, as Nature does things when she emulates the best Art and shuns the showiness and noisiness of the second-best, the wind crept in from the leaden sea, which turned iron under it, corrugated iron. Then the trees began to bend, and writhe, and sigh, and moan; and their leaves flew through the air, and blew and scuttled over the grass, and in an hour all the boughs were bare.