A little boy is walking down a road on the edge of the forest when he hears the beautiful trill of a nightingale; he is so enticed that he runs after it into the woods. He follows the bird to the edge of a clearing; it lands on a golden bough and begins to glitter all about as if its plumage were on fire with rubies, emeralds, diamonds. A beautiful woman steps in after the bird and calls it by name - Autumn, sired of Lark and the Falcon, the Great One; she is the witch of the South, Belinda, the darling of the Summer.

Belinda reaches out to stroke the bird - but it lunges at her wrist with its beak. The shrill song falls off, a deathly quiet descends upon the grove, and with the flowing blood of Belinda come the frosts and cold of Winter, the dark lady, who enters wreathed about in a long veil of blackness, glittering with stars.

She is Winter, wrapped in the Night, which moves and shivers about her as if a living being. She strokes it, whispers to it, and begins wrapping it around the trees -- so long a scarf, there is no end of it, going out fold by fold like the web from a spider.

Last of all, she stoops above the wounded muse, speaks in her ear a word or two of her harsh and eastern tongue, then swaddles her and carries her off. Belinda’s skin, once as bright and smooth, as fair as a forest of greening elms, looks worn and bark-like behind the blackness. But her face remains unhidden, pale and perfect, and it has the preserved look of the recently dead.

As they disappear into the forest, a single flower, a daisy, falls from the wilting garland in Summer’s long, golden tresses, which are beginning to grey with age and frost. It falls on the one spot of earth miraculously untouched by the frosts and the dark cloak of night, beneath the golden bough.

The boy, more curious than ever, but also filled with the unfathomable dread of all he has seen, gathers up the courage to steal in after the flower. He plucks it up from the ground and brings it up to his nose; ah! the smell is the sweet perfume of Belinda, the scent of long and lazy days when every flower imaginable blooms and the air is busy with bees plucking the nectar pores of the honey-blossoms. Oh that sweet, unimaginable scent! And what good for the boy, for it replaces all the horror with a kind of caress of loveliness and the incomparable sweetness of being.

Above him the bird Autumn is unsettled from her perch, for her talons have caught in the fabric of the night; she wobbles and stumbles over the branch, unsettling its foliage, which clinks abundantly, then tumbles, and then, spreading her long and ocher wings, wings off with much effort and stress, for she is dragging up with her the whole quilt of darkness. All about the forest the leaves shudder with the burden’s departure, the trees groan in the concord of their bondage…and then they are free. Autumn takes wing with the Night, and the child of sorrows is delivered into joy!

From then on and ever that boy was called Spring, and he could be seen always dancing in the desert, a garland of fresh-cut flowers in his hair.