The frost in the wild deep grass and pine needles rises like powdered amber around the apple gleaners. It tingles in their nostrils. They come to a still ocean like a sapphire pulsing fire in the low sun, Peter gets his burn back. But it warms what was too cold anyway, and he does not mind it. He and the others arc too sunk in the spell of apples to think of ordinary things. They stow their sacks aboard the boat beneath a sunset like a wide window opened in the wall of paradise.
Uncle Timothy and Father take the oars. The boys lie along the sacks of nubbly apples, and the smell of apples is in them and through them and goes cut over the sea. These apples come home by water, through an afterglow that is clear amber.
That golden evening is a weather breeder. Next morning a wild October rainstorm lashes the house, the coast, the world. Peter lies on his belly in the attic and reads the book of October, Twice-Told Tales. And gods shake the roof of his father's house and the walls of it, and Peter shakes with the house and feels good all over. The fragrance of hot mincemeat comes up the stairs to him. Slices of drying apples droop on strings from the rafters over his bead. The whole house smells of apples and resounds with the music of a mighty rain. And Peter is happy as a rainbound boy can be.
Three days of rain. Then the weather clears under a northerly gale. The young trees bend almost double, and the wind that means the end of things roars like the sea. All the leaves of the earth ate going from the trees. The farm is going bare. The air shines red and golden with the bright leaves' going. Peter leans against the gale on his way to school, and the north wind makes balloons of his breeches' leg. He is sad for the sight of the flying leaves and the ending of summer. The green half of the year is gone like a fish under the sea. The world has grown wider for the loss of its leaves. The boy can see houses he never noticed were there before on far hills which the wind has stripped. And Peter thinks of lost Lucy, and Lucy fits in with the sad bright time.
And on the wave of his sadness, Peter falls in love with another girl. Emily is as dark as Lucy was fair. Maybe it would be well to have some change of color in his family's hair, Peter thinks. Emily has nine ringlets down to her waist, and Peter's mind gets tangled in those. Peter carries her books for her and helps her find footing across the drenched earth. Emily clings to Peter from the force of the wind and her curls lash his checks, and Peter burns all over. And he burns the more because his way takes him past Lucy's windows, and without looking Peter feels and knows she is there watching him and his new love.
Across the wild light of this new excitement the shadow of the returned Aunt Emma falls. She is back for the autumnal equinox. Back with jars of cold cures and bottles of herb drinks that taste like torchlight processions and brass bands.
And Peter's walking in the gale and serving as shield to Emily have laid him low with the cold of the year. Aunt Emma pounces upon him in his fever. She adds heat to heat. Peter lies on his bed, radiating heat waves like a hot teakettle. Bitter brews go into him. In his fever-dreams Emily screams with her curls across the whole sky. She looks like a maenad. And Peter is uncomfortable with maenads, they are so unsettling and uncertain to get along with.
Peter wakes in the middle of the night, alone, for his brothers have doubled up with Father and Uncle Timothy. Me looks out through the high window panes, and three shooting stars go down the whole length of the sky. Downstairs he hears the hollow voice of Aunt Emma late at work cooking up new remedies to try out on him and lecturing his father on his being too easy on his children. Aunt Emma sounds very far away now, And Peter is very sure he is going to die, now he has seen three stars fall. He decides to give his jackknife, which Uncle Cephus gave him on his tenth birthday and which he has slept on every night since then, including this, to James, after all. But not his ship in the bottle. That goes to Father. Peter falls to sleep with tears in his eyes over pity for himself. The last thing he does is hope that his brothers will be kind to his dog Spot.
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