SEPTEMBER. 429 



STUDIES IN THE FIELD AND FOREST. 



BY WILSON FLAGO. 



SEPTEMBER. 



The rising morn is sluggish in the east : 



The music of her waking hour has ceased. 



The merry crickets are not yet in tune, 



But wait to hail the brighter hour of noon. 



The face of nature has an older look ; 



A greener vegetation has awoke. 



The fields are brilliant with a riper hue, 



And Heaven's bright vault is dyed in deeper blue. 



A healthful fieshness comes upon the gales, 



And beauty sits enthroned in all the woods and dales. 



Though many a ripened field is brown and sere, 



The lights of merry harvest time appear. 



Inspiring man with healthful enterprise, 



And blessings wholesome labor ne'er denies. 



Though summer's toils and pleasantries are o'er, 



The fruits are spread in heaps at every door ; 



And we forget those pastimes gone apace. 



In harvest toils and pleasures of the chase. 



Full many are the hearts, both old and young. 



That leap, when o'er the woods September's wreaths are flung. 



No. VII. Music of Insects. 



About midsummer, the majority of the singing birds have 

 become silent ; but as one voice after another drops away, a 

 new host of musicians of a different character take up the 

 chorus, and their spinning melodies are suggestive of the 

 early and later harvest, as the voices of the birds are asso- 

 ciated with seed time and the season of flowers. In our 

 climate the voices of no species of insects are very loud ; but 

 when their vast multitudes are united in chorus, they may 

 often be heard above the din and clatter of a busy town. 

 Nature is exhaustless in the means by which she may effect 

 the same end ; and birds, insects and reptiles are each pro- 

 vided with different but equally effective instruments for 

 producing sounds. While birds and quadrupeds make sounds 

 by means of a pipe connecting with their lungs, the frogs 



