THINGS TO HEAR THIS FALL 



91 



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

 They rustle to the eddying gust, and to the rahbit's tread." 



And they should rustle to your tread as well. 

 Scuff along in them where they lie in deep windrows 

 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 

 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, because 

 everybody has heard that loud scream of the jay in 

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

 sentinel crow from the top of some 

 tall tree. The robins may not be all 

 gone, 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 

 become so empty, that the cries of 

 the jay and the crow seem, on a 

 gloomy day, to be the only sounds 

 in all the hollow woods. There could 

 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 



