164 
NATURE NOTES 
crimson. One stands up like an umbrella, flaked with snow and 
soot, and makes a landmark for field mice. Here puff-balls 
cluster in a fairy ring of luxuriant grass. These, when mature, 
are bags which squirt brown dust from a central aperture at a 
touch of the foot. From an unsound trunk juts a fungus like a 
great freckled, yellow tongue. 
However, Nature soon wearies of the splendid spectacle. 
Mother earth demands something of the trees in return for 
nourishment at her patient breast. Then beech, chestnut, elm, 
sycamore, oak and lime shower down their gold as the wind, 
that subtle tax-collector, rustles through their branches. By 
and by the earth will demand a silver tribute of the dark-hued 
clouds, though at present the sad stubble is slightly silvered in 
the sun only by the work of spiders, which seem at this time to 
be busy with the spinning-jenny. 
Though the other birds are hushed, the rooks seem more 
cheerful than ever ; they make long and clamorous excursions 
in a train which stretches nearly a mile across the sky ; its van- 
guard, which has passed, looks like dust against the blue, and 
when we think the last are passing another throng appears. 
The country of to-day has one melody at least which our fore- 
fathers never knew — who shall say what pleasant reflections and 
memories the hum of the busy threshing-machine does not 
awake in the mind of the casual hearer ? 
Somewhat later the starry-belted Orion will smile at eve 
across the misty fields, and the spider-threads will shine with 
frost. Meanwhile, as you tread some lane across which trees 
shake each other’s skeleton hands, step reverently, for your 
“ steps are on an empire’s dust,” and a glorious empire it was, 
and fell when its banners waved most gorgeously. 
J. W. Cole. 
BIRDS OF PARADISE. 
HE efforts of the Selborne Society to prevent the ex- 
termination of these beautiful birds and to discourage 
the senseless and cruel fashion of wearing bird of 
paradise plumes in hats, together with the interest 
attaching to the varied and splendid decoration of the majority 
of the species, seems to mark out this group of birds for special 
consideration ; and I hope the following notes on the Paradiseidas, 
which I have studied for years, will interest other Nature lovers 
in this magnificent family. 
The birds of paradise now known comprise nearly fifty 
species and are mostly confined to New Guinea. The most 
striking feature is the remarkable diversity in the ornamentation 
