It was a beautiful day in autumn. The golden sunshine sparkled through the leaves, and the colorful trees danced gently to the breath of the wind. On a giant oak tree, a young leaf named Leafy was gazing eagerly at the vibrant world around him. But while all his happy companions were calmly swaying to and fro, Leafy was quivering with fear.
“Oh, I shall fall! I shall fall!” he kept saying. “All my companions are dozing quietly. They don’t know what may happen to them. I am sure the wind will fling me off my branch in fright, and I shall come tumbling down—down—down!”
But here the poor little leaf began to cry. In fact, he was almost the only one that was not ready to sleep quietly. The days grew shorter, the air grew colder. Some of the elder leaves fell to the ground, but there they lay still and silent, dry and brown, while Leafy were whirling and twirling in his great fear.
“I think autumn has come at last,” said an old sparrow that was sitting on a branch close by.
“Autumn?” exclaimed Leafy; “what is autumn?”
“Don’t you know?” twittered the sparrow, surprised at Leafy’s question. “The season in which you leaves turn brown and dry, and fall to the ground: the trees are then bare, and the cold nipping wind blows across them—the winter is come.”
“Horrors!” shrieked Leafy, tossing to and fro, for he was frightened beyond measure. “I will not be brown and dry—I will not! Oh dear! Oh dear! The wind, I know, will come rushing, howling, and tearing, and fling me to the ground, and there I shall lie, and wither, and die, and never be green and tender more. Oh dear me! I wish I were out of this world.”
And he tossed and trembled, till an old lady-bird, who sat with folded wings, and was quietly listening to him, said at last, “Do not be so remorseful, little leaf, I beg of you; the trees do not grow old—no, they only put off their garments if they become ragged, or for a change put on a new one.”
“Put off their garments!” answered Leafy, as he dried his eyes; “but I have none, and cannot put off anything.”
“It is not a matter of consequence,” said the lady-bird. “The world is not so uneven as you imagine. I fancy if you came down to the ground you would swim with delight in your new existence. Your sisters, the flowers, have disappeared from shame, because they know now what the trees had hidden in their midst, or what their oak trees could know—but I will tell you also the story of the dews, that are in winter the water of the springs.”
“Shredding dews! the water-springs!” exclaimed Leafy. “I don’t understand what you mean.”
“Be quiet and listen then,” answered the lady-bird. “You have no idea where you will be blown by the wind; what you will know, by which you will be nourished, when your green trunk split, just above your root, and the sap run out at spring-time. You little, trembling leaf! You are now like an egg that is about to burst, and give birth to a fledgling. You have something great within you—you possess the tree’s future, that lays now dormant within you. The wood, the blossoms, the acorns, all lie slumbering within you. In the frost-ball is warmth, and the dead, the worm. Did you ever notice how lively and creeping in spring the moistened soil is?”
“But, oh dear!” exclaimed Leafy, still in tears; “that will be quite another sort of life. It is better to be here and watch the world, than to be a poor withered thing down there.”
“It may be so,” replied the lady-bird, “but when an oak tree grows old, it puts off its garments, and then tells stories of the spring and autumn months to the little leaves that upleap in their bosom and among their boughs. They tell each other, repeat the stories, and they kindle sprightly ants, fire-flies, little hopping grasshoppers, and many a thing still smaller. There are revels at the tree-trunks, in that little world of insects, and the acorn that has grown out of your withered self, falls down among them, and governs them all. Now speak, which is the best?”
But Leafy trembled and cried, and screamed, “Oh, take me off! take me off! I will not be chopped wood, if that is my fate! Oh no! The jack-knife of man is still sharper than the winter’s cold.”
“But the little worms eat up the wood,” reminded the lady-bird.
“Go away, go away!” shrieked Leafy; “if I sit trembling here from nothing else than the thought of being eaten up by worms. I will not go down; the wind will fling me off; I shall fall down, and dip into the dark earth, and it will crush me, and—.”
The wind now came rushing down from the heavens, with its corner to the right, and whizzed against Leafy so hard that he screamed out. Since the lady-bird had rebuked him, and assured him that nature harbors no real enemies, he had sunk into a doze, and by that means the wind had got a little fed with him, and by jumping tête-à-tête with him, and as it had moved Leafy’s trunk a little loose, most decidedly made a meal of him but now he fell. He did not fly up on the wind as he had said, but flung himself down, and as fate would have it, into a puddle that had to be dried up by autumn’s sun, and he was stuck there. And what unspeakable horrors now!—the Puddle laughed at the good wakeful glistening sunshine; it bore down on it, that it might flay the upper skin off and set free the imprisoned leaf.
“You are a nice one! You like to lie there,” said the Sunshine, “but that you must give up. I only touch the surface; but here you feel, by the rising odor, how the worms are busy removing your most secret science. You will live no more!”
And it leaked and poured a little, dribbled and allowed a torrent to flow over it, made a cascade, in fact, of its over-abundance, that Leafy might roll down to the inmates of the cellar that smelled in the wet earth—the good-starred worms.
Since he had nothing else to do, he fancied he could hear what was spoken in the dark inner cellar, and he was sharp enough to comprehend the whole.
First they did eat, and continued to eat; the baskets stood in rows—mouldy pieces of bread—very, very well!
There came an ordinary worm that had been from earth to earth, gone with soil and ran up, like the barrel-organ of a musician, and gave a little concert, as was obligatory for ladies blossoming on and on, and went, that is, wriggled the round again and put all in a pretty glittering tinkle of the glistening earth.
And Row by Row the worms mistress praised, and said, “Behold your makeshift evening entertaiment!”
But Leafy heard it all as well as flowing water: “Pretty tinkle! evening entertaiement!” he murmured. “Evening-tinkling goes off into morning’s shining beam—the sun shall break through into this damp cellar. I shall be chopped wood reduced to splinters—I shall be a spinning-road for flies, or I shall feed birds or choice gobbling turkeys; or shall be crammed into the nice fat corpse of a man, and find myself split into a thousand, thousand little living beings, eh! eh! [no offering hands were held before the Apple, or a rose withered—but wished, did I pop out little burrows, and houses]? Pish, what a silly life!”
“I tell you the worms are singing something, and doing something; they talk about it too, and your distressed trunk is that you never weary of their ballad, it is that which you afterwards see in winter apparently dead.”
“That is what they say,” replied the lady-bird. “Just as your autumn-trees will be all wood, these will be dried leaves, and then you will yet row after row spin the glistening thing that you see changed for a covering on the vault—to the ball in your head, and know nothing positive, nothing of yourself.”
“But I will still be an oak,” said Leafy.
“There lie the seeds for that,” it answered.
“Was it quiet there in the land at the home to the horizon, or beyond it?” asked Leafy that he might yet see how such a vast emptiness looked.
“Just as you fancy,” said the lady-bird; “here is a holed stone that was from an earth to Mars, and vice versa for the sake of curiosity. I peep through it—I see all red, and you lay off your green mantle; then it is ruddy sunshine without trunks and things. Suppose you changed again; but it would be proper for you for your age to sit quiet. Aren’t you ashamed of said ‘morning-sleep,’ of being so ashamed of? Open your wards, and let the sunshine come.”
“Oh! never, never!” exclaimed Leafy, and lay numb in proportion as he found motion impossible, but now he lay he was never so stiff and now, never before really nervous; as if he must, if nothing at all, be transported thousands of miles lastly, farther and farther away, when there should be fluctuation, when there was nothing, and when layers of ice and snow should fall off miles on miles on the trodden-up vault.
He commenced his tussle blindly against the little glowing sunshine-words that kissed him so warmly. At last they came into touch with the black-knobbed spiked acorn. The grey down grew warm. Something sparkled hard and cut Leafy afterwards very much at the same instant; for a warmish fluid streamed into him up and down through all his veins, but whether still slumbering, or the sap and vitality of the young root he could not distinguish. He felt that he grew; his bands extended, shot out millofile—and Leafy became an acorn-tree, and twigging out might think, and at last spin on being the only proud-conceited tree he pruned fresh boughs, and cut white smoke noaxe was ever laid to the harsh wood-it did burning joy in autumn: no shock of trees ever snatched on dry trunks and every fresh spring burgeoned into differently-colored blossoms, to suit nature’s hangers-on.
Long time afterwards, a little leaf sat quaking at the end of an old bough.
“Oh dear, I shall fall, I shall fall!” said it. As a lady-bird came by, it pointed long-tragically with its fore-foot, and said, “The earth is dark and damp, the cold ice-ball waits there, and white waves rush on the swell there-from—it can fling one about nevertheless, when one’s dead, eat a good mouthful of one. Oh dear, our insects get eaten by birds, and the fat corpses of men have worms that see daylight. I was expected too; horror! horror!”
The lady-bird laughed good-humoredly as she said, “I thought you were a long time growing up!”
“It was deceived in its thinking not so much to the right as to be the shadow to the left,” remarked Leafy; “but that still depends upon what one calls understanding nature.”
And so little things can do even greater than what they say; they don’t know and assure one of many important things!”