The autumn of 1905 was unusually splendid in riotous color. That year Stockbridge saw herself in a mirror, as it were, in the Outdoor Studies of Frederic Crowninshield, who painted Stockbridge in varied moods, from the yellowing of her pollard willows to the November browns of pasture and hill-an historic procession of the Months from the Moon of Blossorns to the Moon of Snows, typical of all Berkshire; yet the artist set -up his easel within a stone's throw of his own door.

Here is the 'harrowed field and Monument; there rises Tom Ball, beyond a blue abundance of larkspur in the garden; of a shaggy richness is August's hedge of goldenrod and aster; September has stencilled a Venetian border of red and gold (maples) across the olive-green skirts of Bear Mountain; in late September the close-cut hedge is smothered, in fallen leaves of the sort which little Julian Hawthorne picked up so joyously-" Look, papa, here's a bunch of fire! " Most splendid is October's sentinel-tree in full flame at the turn of a mountain road. " If but only my cousins in Norway could see these views of Stockbridge, then they would understand what our American autumn really is, " said a transplanted Norwegian.

The mirror of our Stockbridge year is complete with the painting Wind-Swept Snow of Walter Nettleton; Berkshire's "winter veil of maiden white" in which the artist sees the reflection of Puritan character.

Robert Reid is a native of Stockbridge, and one may well believe that his boyhood's unconscious feasts of line and color in mountain lanes and meadow are infused in his mural paintings in our Statehouse and the Library of Congress.