THE OAK. 31 



Rambling with unfettered grace, the tendrils of the 

 briary festoon, with its brilliant berries, green, red, 

 yellow, 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, ex- 

 pands 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 over- 

 grown with the dewberry, 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 us 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 nut-hatch, cleaving its- 

 prize in the chink of some dry bough : the humble 

 bee, torpid on the disk of the purple thistle . . . Then 

 falls the "sere and yellow leaf," parting from its 

 spray without a breeze tinkling in the boughs, and 

 rustling, scarce audibly, along, rests at our feet and 

 tells that we part too." Journal of a Naturalist, 

 p. 117. 



