A WONDER-BOOK
not I tell you how old King Midas came to America, and changed the dusky autumn, such as it is in other countries, into the burnished beauty which it here puts on? He gilded the leaves of the great volume of Nature.’
‘Cousin Eustace,’ said Sweet Fern, a good little boy, who was always making particular inquiries about the precise height of giants and the littleness of fairies, ‘how big was Marygold, and how much did she weigh after she was turned to gold?’
‘She was about as tall as you are,’ replied Eustace, ‘and, as gold is very heavy, she weighed at least two thousand pounds, and might have been coined into thirty or forty thousand gold dollars. I wish Primrose were worth half as much. Come, little people, let us clamber out of the dell, and look about us.’
They did so. The sun was now an hour or two beyond its noontide mark, and filled the great hollow of the valley with its western radiance, so that it seemed to be brimming with mellow light, and to spill it over the surrounding hill-sides, like golden wine out of a bowl. It was such a day that you could not help saying of it, ‘There never was such a day before!’ although yesterday was just such a day, and to-morrow will be just such another. Ah, but there are very few of them in a twelvemonth’s circle! It is a remarkable peculiarity of these October days, that each of them seems to occupy a great deal of space, although the sun rises rather tardily at that season of the year, and goes to bed, as little children ought, at sober six o’clock, or even earlier. We cannot, therefore, call the days long; but they appear, somehow or other, to make up for their shortness by their breadth; and when
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