Autumn Days
THERE IS SOMETHING about New Hampshire in the fall of the year which belies its smallness. This is queer because that smallness to New Hampshire is what a lot of people like about it. Summer visitors from the cities, for example, who dream of coming here to live talk of the small farms and the small white houses stationed comfortably on the side of some small hill and their mental picture has become the approved style for slick paper advertisements—the Brook of Your Own sort of thing which emphasizes the softness of New Hampshire scenery in a manner which people frbm outside New Hampshire usually describe as "cute."
It has been said that the citizens of New Hampshire have a smallness to them too. The novelist Charles Jackson created a controversy last summer when he pointed out some of the smaller things about his neighbors in Orford and applied them to New Hampshire as a whole. .Ralph Waldo Emerson remarked of this state that the great God had peopled it with "little men." Perhaps he wrote that in the summer too, because, as we said, there is something which belies it in the fall.
This fall the leaves came down early, scraping the sidewalks of the summer's quiet and filling up the woods with light thickness. There was snow early in October which brought an eerie color to all New Hampshire, soft and sharp as a stage whisper. When the snow went, the leaves were golden in the sun and always the best tree to look at was on the corner. You could walk as far as that tree but beyond it the road stretched out a piece to another bend and another flaming tree.
The days were clear and it was not only the corners of roads which asked to be walked to. From the top of any hill you could see farther than you could walk but not farther than you wanted to—which is a good test for hills.
The distances were, specific, a matter of saying "through that woods and up the hill as far as where as the green pasture is; it must be five miles even to there." And far beyond that the mountains were like rusted iron with the edges still sharp, all of a piece and nothing soft or small about them.
It has a bigness to it in this season. We know a local business man of whom it's said that he never looks much farther than his own corner. He told us the other day that he had walked up Oak Hill of a Sund ay afternoon. "I could see the whole world," he said. He's not given to meaning any more than he says, and so we have no doubt that for a little while at any rate, he did. Which is what we mean about New Hampshire in the fall.
A WAH HOO WAH! FOR FRANK s. AUSTIN '09, named Manager of Purchases and Stores for the New York Central System. FOR RICHARD K. HOLDEN '25, appointed Vice President and Superintendent of Agencies for the Columbia National Life Insurance Company. FOR LAWRENCE C. MARSHALL '25, named Vice President of the Bank of The Manhattan Company. FOR FRANK H. HANKINS JR. '28, named Operations Manager of the Atlantic Division of Pan American World Airways. FOR WILLIAM B. HART '36, named Fiction Editor of American Magazine.
