116 NATURALIST'S AUTUMNAL WALK. 



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 observed. 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, 

 and receives a support its own feebleness denies. 

 The agaric, with all its hues, its shades, its ele- 

 gant 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 caesius), blue with unsullied fruit, impeded 

 in his frolic sports, half angry, darts up the silvery 

 bole again, to peep and wonder at the strange in- 

 truder 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 vacant ; 

 the hammering of the nuthatch (sitta europfea), 

 cleaving its prize in the chink of some dry bough ; 



