“The Autumn wind blew over England. It twitched the leaves off the trees, and down they fluttered, spotted red and yellow, or sent them floating, flaunting in wide curves before they settled….There was mist on the woods. Near at hand the stone ladies on the terrace had scarlet flowers in their urns. Thin blue smoke drifted across the flaming dahlias in the long beds that went down to the river. ‘Burning weeds,’ she said aloud…The wind blew the smoke- for in every back garden in the angle of the ivy-grown wall that still sheltered a few last geraniums, leaves were heaped up; keen-fanged flames were eating them- out into the street, into windows that stood open in the drawing-room in the morning. For it was October, the birth of the year.”
(Virginia Woolf, The Years)
