84 NATURALIST’S AUTUMNAL WALK. 
leaf that peeps out, engages his attention, is recognized 
as an intimate, or noted from some novelty that it pre- 
sents in sound or aspect. Every season has its peculiar 
product, and is pleasing or admirable, from causes that 
variously affect our different temperaments or disposi- 
tions ; but there are accompaniments in an autumnal 
morning’s woodland walk, that call for all our notice 
and admiration : the peculiar feeling of the air, and the 
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 ob- 
served. 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 
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, gamboling round the root of an ancient beech, 
its base overgrown with the dewberry (rubus cassius), 
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 of danger to her brood ; 
the noisy tribe repeat the call, are hushed, and leave 
us ; the loud laugh of the woodpecker, joyous and va- 
cant ; the hammering of the nuthatch (sitta europeea), 
cleaving its prize in the chink of some dry bough ; the 
humblebee, torpid on the disk of the purple thistle, just 
lifts a limb to pray forbearance of injury, to ask for 
peace, and bid us 
“ Leave him, leave him to repose.’’ 
The cinquefoil, or the vetch, with one lingering bloom 
