84 NATURALIST'S AUTUMNAL WALK. 



leaf that peeps out, engages his attention, is recognized 

 as an intimate, or noted from some novelty that it pre- 

 sents in sound or aspect. Every season has its peculiar 

 product, and is pleasing or admirable, from causes that 

 variously affect our different temperaments or disposi- 

 tions ; but there are accompaniments in an autumnal 

 morning's woodland walk, that call for all our notice 

 and admiration : the peculiar feeling of the air, and the 

 solemn grandeur of the scene around us, dispose the 

 mind to contemplation and remark ; there is a silence 

 in which we hear every thing, a beauty that will be ob- 

 served. The stump of an old oak is a very landscape, 

 with rugged alpine steeps bursting through forests of 

 verdant mosses, with some pale, denuded, branchless 

 lichen, like a scathed oak, creeping up the sides or 

 crowning the summit. Rambling with unfettered grace, 

 the tendrils of the briony (tamus communis) festoon 

 with its brilliant berries, green, yellow, red, the slender 

 sprigs of the hazel, or the thorn; it ornaments their 

 plainness, arid receives a support its own feebleness 

 denies. The agaric, with all its hues, its shades, its 

 elegant variety of forms, expands its cone sprinkled 

 with the freshness of the morning ; a transient fair, a 

 child of decay, that " sprang up in a night, and will 

 perish in a night." The squirrel, agile with life and 

 timidity, gamboling round the root of an ancient beech, 

 its base overgrown with the dewberry (rubus cassius), 

 blue with unsullied fruit, impeded in his frolic sports, 

 half angry, darts up the silvery bole again, to peep and 

 wonder at the strange intruder on his haunts. The jay 

 springs up, and, screaming, tells of danger to her brood ; 

 the noisy tribe repeat the call, are hushed, and leave 

 us ; the loud laugh of the woodpecker, joyous and va- 

 cant ; the hamrrfcring of the nuthatch (sitta europaea), 

 cleaving its prize in the chink of some dry bough ; the 

 bumblebee, torpid on the disk of the purple thistle, just 

 lifts a limb to pray forbearance of injury, to ask for 

 peace, and bid us 



" Leave him, leave him to repose." 

 The cinquefoil, or the vetch, with one lingering bloom 



