THE OAK. 



31 



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, 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, 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 wood- 

 pecker, 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 yel- 

 low 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. 



