Contrast the mood at Devon during the summer session and fall session. Identify at least three factors that might account for this change in mood.

The summer season and mood at Devon is described just
after Finny has managed to talk him and Gene out of getting into trouble because they
missed a meal through jumping out of the tree. Gene
comments:

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That was the way the Masters tended to treat us
that summer. They seemed to be modifying their usual attitude of floating, chronic
disapproval. During the winter most of them regarded anything unexpected in a student
with suspicion, seeming to feel that anything we said or did was potentially illegal.
Now on these clear June days in New Hampshire they appeared to uncoil, they seemed to
believe that we were with them about half the time, and only spent the other half trying
to make fools of them. A streak of tolerance was detectable; Finny decided that they
were beginning to show commendable signs of
maturity.

Note how a metaphor
is used to describe the teachers - like snakes, they have uncoiled in the summer due to
the warmth and are more permissive and accepting of students. They are "mellowed" with
the warmer whether and those "clear June
days".

Significantly, it is Finny's fall (helped by Gene)
that marks the end of summer and the Fall which leads to winter. This is significant
because it marks the end of innocence in Gene and a time when both he and Finny have to
face up to unpleasant realities and come to terms with their relationship and with the
War itself. Chapter Six begins by stating "Peace had deserted Devon" and then continues
to state that although the surroundings were not affected by Fall that much and there
was still the appearance of summer, winter was truly on the
way:

But all
had been caught up, like the first fallen leaves, by a new and energetic wind.... this
was [Devon's] one hundred and sixty-third Winter Session, and the forces reassembled for
it scattered the easygoing summer spirit like so many fallen
leaves.

This change in tone
is caught up by the introductory service of the school, which represented a kind of
clamp-down - a return to authoritarian rules and regimes. Gene himself relates this
change to Finny's "accident":

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Still it had come to an end, in the last long
rays of daylight at the tree, when Phineas
fell.

This change in mood is
reflected again by Gene's comment on the students and how they have changed now in the
Fall:

We had
been an idiosyncratic, leaderless band in the summer, undirected except by the eccentric
notions of Phineas. Now the official class leaders and politicians could be seen taking
charge, assuming as a matter of course their control of these walks and fields which had
belonged only to us.

Thus
this change in mood is kind of a pathetic fallacy - the innocence and fun of summer is
ended in a number of ways. Firstly through the act of Gene pushing Finny off the tree
and his "accident". Secondly through the students continued maturing and awareness of
the War, and lastly because many students were beginning to think about signing up
instead of finishing their schooling. The bleak realities of their existence coincide
with the change in season.