Come with me to the places where the young men lie whose bodies have long since been buried in the earth. Come with me where they walk and move again tonight, and you shall see your brother’s face again, and hear his voice, and see again, as they march toward you from their graves the company of the young men who died, as he did, in October, speaking to you their messages of flight, of triumph, and the all-exultant darkness, telling you that all will be again as it was once.”
October had come again, and he would lie there in his mother’s house at night, and feel the darkness moving softly all about him, and hear the dry leaves scampering on the street outside, and the huge and burly rushes of the wind. And then the wind would rush away with huge caprice, and he could hear it far off roaring with remote demented cries in the embraces of great trees, and he would lie there thinking:
“October has come again—has come again”—feeling the dark around him, not believing that his father could be dead, thinking: “The strange and lonely years have come again…. I have come home again… come home again… and will it not be with us all as it has been?”—feeling the darkness as it moved about him, thinking: “Is it not the same darkness that I knew in childhood, and have I not lain here in bed before and felt this darkness moving all about me?… Did we not hear dogs that barked in darkness, in October?” he then thought. “Were not their howls far broken by the wind?… And hear dry leaves that scampered on the streets at night… and the huge and burly rushes of the wind… and hear huge limbs that stiffly creak in the remote demented howlings of the burly wind… and something creaking in the wind at night… and think, then, as we think now, of all the men who have gone and never will come back again, and of our friends and brothers who lie buried in the earth?… Oh, has not October now come back again?” he cried. “As always—as it always was?”—and hearing the great darkness softly prowling in his mother’s house at night, and thinking, feeling, thinking, as he lay there in the dark:
"Now October has come again which in our land is different from October in the other lands. The ripe, the golden month has come again, and in Virginia the chinkapins are falling. Frost sharps the middle music of the seasons, and all things living on the earth turn home again. The country is so big you cannot say the country has the same October. In Maine, the frost comes sharp and quick as driven nails; just for a week or so the woods, all of the bright and bitter leaves, flare up: the maples turn a blazing bitter red, and other leaves turn yellow like a living light, falling
