NATURALIST'S AUTUMNAL WALK. 113 



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 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, gambolling round the root of an 

 ancient beech, its base overgrown with the dewberry 

 (rubus cccsiu8\ 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 europcea), 

 cleaving its prize in the chink of some dry bough ; 

 the bumblebee, torpid on the disc of the purple 

 thistle, just lifts a limb to pray forbearance of in- 

 jury, to ask for peace, and bid us 



Leave him, leave him to repose. 



The cinquefoil, or the vetch, with one lingering 

 bloom, yet appears, and we note it from its lone- 

 liness, Spreading on the light foliage of the fern, 



