These October days were the best of the year. The trees had turned fully and there was an edge of winter in the air. Halfway to town a maple stood; each morning he had watched its leaves die toward scarlet until today the tree flamed with a fall fire. The hills beyond town, nearly high enough to be called true mountains, had come into a variegated beauty, clusters of oaks shading into a scope of richer sweetgum, interspersed by the evergreen denial of pine and cedar, so that John walked with his eyes lifted up to them.