THINGS TO HEAR THIS FALL 



91 



" Heaped in the hollows of the grove, the autumn leaves lie dead ; *J 

 '-* They rustle to the eddying gust, and to the rabbit's tread." 



And they should rustle to your tread as well 

 Scuff along in them where they lie in deep windrows 

 j'by the side of the road ; and hear them also, as the 

 wind gathers them into a whirling flurry and sends 

 them rattling over the fields. 



VI 

 You ought to hear the cry of the blue jay and the 



^R. caw of the crow in the autumn woods. 



.- 



~. .;" The robin and the wren are flown, but from the shrub the jay, 



. And from the wood-top calls the crow through all the gloomy day." 



Everybody knows those lines of Bryant, beca 

 J- everybody has heard that loud scream of the jay in 

 the lonesome woods, and the caw, caw, caw of the 

 sentinel crow from the top of some 

 ;itall tree. The robins may not be all 

 ^ jne, for I heard and saw a flock of 

 them this year in January; but they 

 are silent now, and so many of the 

 birds have gone, and the woods have 

 p^jf become so empty, that the cries of 

 e jay and the crow seem, on a 

 fif gloomy day, to be the only sounds 

 *7 in all the hollow woods. There could 

 N hardly be an autumn for me if I did not hear these 

 two voices speaking the one with a kind of warn- 

 ing in its shrill, half-plaintive cry ; the other with a 



