slope. The great spectacle does not come until October, but the
placards announcing it grow more numerous and vivid day by day.
Blackberry leaves are splashed with crimson; daily the blood-red
banner of the sumac grows larger and more striking. Walnuts and
hickories begin to lose their yellow leaves; patches of yellow appear
on the elms and the lindens; though the mass of the foliage remains
until October, many leaves flutter down daily, and it is possible to
see twice as far into the thicket as in June.

_"The wine of life keeps oozing, drop by drop;
The leaves of life keep falling, one by one."_

Flocks of grackles spend their days in the cornfields which run down
to the creek bottom and their nights amid the wild rice and the rushes
and willows in the swamp. In the timber fringes and the broad bottoms
along the creek you get glimpses of the catbird feasting on the
grapes and the wild plums; the brown thrasher and the woodthrush,
wholly silent now; the little house wren who has lost her chatter; the
vireos and the orioles, the wood pewee, the crested fly catcher and
the kingbird. They all seem to be going southward. There are a few
nests and young birds in the early part of the month--the
yellow-billed cuckoo, the Savannah sparrow, the goldfinch. But these
are exceptions to the general rule.

Little flocks of warblers flit among the tree tops and the bushy
margin of ponds near the creek will soon be alive with the myrtle
warblers--as numerous as English sparrows in a barn-yard. In the night
time you may hear the "tseep" of the warblers as they wing their way
swiftly towards the southland. Sometimes there is the tinkling sound
of the bob-o-link, also flying in the night time, and in the morning