It is the heavy rain no less than the chilly air, the wet days as well as the frosty nights, which have earned for October its added name, and which mark this month so clearly as the real end of a season. We often get a long spell of warm weather in September; it may linger even over the opening of October; but it is October that sets for good and all its fiery seal upon the ruins of the summer. Yet October has been a delightful month; a month of golden dawns, bright days, and fiery sunsets. And it is closing with quiet moonlight nights under whose gauzy veil the landscape lies transfigured, and far hills show faintly as through mists of dreamland. This is St. Martin's Summer:

The colours of the leaves, that so long seemed cold and sullen, are swiftly changing in the sharpening air of night. Among the tattered foliage there broaden, day after day, gleams of that fiery splendour that in a few weeks will flare through the length and breadth of the woodland, like the afterglow of summer. The few last leaves of the wild cherry shine like fire in the coppice, and the horse chestnuts in the meadow are all gold from base to crown. Dead leaves lie thick upon the rustling pathway, where brown of oakleaf, crimson of beech, russet of maple, and gold of elm, lends each its own particular note of colour to the splendid carpet; while the foliage of the sycamore, still clinging to its brilliant stalks, is painted with such varied tints, such greens and browns, such inky blacks and flaming yellows, that one might almost fancy some young dryad had been wandering through the woodland with her brush and had tried her colours on the leaves.

So bright the days have been, so warm is the lingering sunshine, that even the thrush has been trying over his old sweet songs, yet to airs so quiet and subdued that they seemed but a reverie of springtime. All day the robin sings. He is the minstrel of the autumn. Now when other birds are silent his voice rings clear through the deserted woods, and we realise more fully how passing sweet are his familiar melodies.

There are few signs of life among the autumn trees. The jays wrangle as they gather the acorns, and at times a troop of fieldfares chatter as they pass. But the sounds of the October woodland are the patter of falling leaves—now filling the air like rain, and now whirled along the path in fiery eddy; the rush of the wind among the rocking tops; and now and then the creak of branches interlocked, that chafe and fret almost with a cry of pain, such as in old days, ere Pan was dead, startled the woodcutter on the slopes of Apennine.

We wander in the woods, however, with senses unattuned to sights and sounds about us. Had we but eyes we could not fail to see some life stirring even now. Were our ears but trained aright we should be aware of ceaseless sounds of movement. The birds are here, had we but the gift to see them. If no ringdove coos in the shadow of the pines, we may hear as our footsteps rustle on the leafy ways, the crash of wings among distant branches. If no woodpecker's shout breaks in upon the stillness, we may watch the silent figure of the forester in green close crouched against the giant elm. If no magpie chatters in the tree-tops we may at least catch a glimpse of black and white plumage as the wary old campaigner dives into the thickets. This old fir just off the pathway, with its close growing foliage and its canopies of ivy and woodbine, is a screen at once from the wind and the keen eyes of the woodlanders. In its shadow we may stand aside and watch the life of the woods go by, perhaps even overhear some of the secrets of the

Jays, that just now were busy over the acorns, are moving leisurely down the slope, absorbed in gossip, wholly unconscious of any spectator of their movements. There is a wide difference between the quick, impetuous actions of a startled jay, on the look-out for danger, and his lazy, loitering manner when he is quite at his ease, and thinks no one is watching him. Now, as they come nearer, they break into a chorus of loud, harsh notes, mingling with their own wild sylvan speech scraps borrowed from magpie and missel-thrush. Now one mimics the hoarse cry of a crow just sailing over. Now they all join in a babel of odd, inarticulate, indescribable sounds. Still nearer they come. Suddenly one alights close by, three yards off at farthest. He is off again in a moment, too scared to speak. Here comes another. He, too, settles near, but notices nothing. What a handsome fellow he is! What a splendid touch of blue there is in his wing—a blue such as no sapphire or lapis or turquoise could really rival for a moment. His crest is slightly lifted; the sunlight glistens on his polished bill. Easily he sways on a tall ash sapling, looking idly round. Suddenly he starts—is gone. One by one his comrades reach the tree. One after one the startled birds take wing again and vanish in the thickets. The rustle of their quick movements dies away. Their clamorous cries grow fainter, and then cease. Silence settles down once more—the silence of a sleep.

The sharp touch of winter in October has changed the whole face of things. Cold and wind and wet have set their mark alike on woodland and on garden border. Everywhere there is change. The birds of summer have all left us. No bee or wasp is stirring. In this pallid sunshine are no gnats to poise in cloudy column. No moths hover on quivering wings among the ruined flowers. Of the shy four-footed creatures of whose lives we know so little, some are still broad awake and busy, caring nothing for the cold; but some have already entered on their winter sleep. The dormouse is rolled in his snug ball of moss, the hedgehog is buried in his bed of leaves. Grass-snake and viper have crawled away into warm hiding places in banks or among the roots of trees. The frog has buried himself in his cold bed of mud at the bottom of the pond. The toad has squeezed his burly figure into a hole in a tree stump, or under some sheltering stone. It is the fondness of the toad for hiding in holes and corners—not only in winter, but to some extent all the year—which has given rise to so many marvellous tales of the discovery of toads in the heart of trees or in solid blocks of marble. Toads may often be found in holes. But never yet was one found living in any cavity whatsoever where there was no communication with the outer world, no chink through which insects might make their way after the manner of the fly into the parlour of the spider.

Long before the frosts of October, and while the weather was still warm and sunny, snails were to be seen collected in hundreds on the fences of fields and lanes—on their way, no doubt, to winter quarters. Though whether they expected to find suitable lodgings up there at the tops of the palings, or whether they were only sunning themselves for the last time before crawling down to earth to bury themselves in the holes into which the posts were driven, is perhaps less clear.

Some few snails are provided already with close-fitting doors. Others will seal up their gates with a temporary barricade, behind which they will sleep until the trumpet-call of spring shall break on their dull senses. Do they dream, these snails? Do visions of plump cabbages and brilliant dahlias flit through their molluscous minds? Do they in slumber enjoy again the midnight raid upon the marrow-bed, or cry havoc on the choicest lilies of the garden?

There is a strange stillness in the woods these autumn days; a mournful silence, as of regret for the lost summer. The birds are quiet; the insects, whose life and beauty lent so much to the brightness of the summer, are dying in the sharpening air, or are creeping away to hide themselves for the winter. October is a fatal month for the lower forms of life. The different species of our native insects are numbered by tens of thousands, and of the myriads of these with which the air of August, and even of September, teemed, only a few, a very few, will survive the chillier dawns and sunsets of this month, which marks the limit of their lives. At the best their lives are brief. The lives of insects, in their perfect condition, are more often numbered only by months, or even weeks: while the little sad-coloured stone-flies that haunt the banks of streams, entering on their last stage without mouths, spend only a few days of strange existence; and there are other flies which, born after sunset and dying before sunrise, never see the full light of day at all.

Those insects which survive the winter do so as a rule by retiring into the shelter of buildings, into crevices in walls, or into hollow trees, and there remaining, motionless and apparently lifeless, all through the cold season, coming out again at the return of spring. Some butterflies are especially fond of taking up their quarters for the winter in the roofs of houses; and the cornices of unoccupied rooms seem particularly favourite resting-places. There is a case on record in which a Small Tortoiseshell butterfly, having entered a church during service-time one Sunday in August, settled calmly on a rafter over the heads of the congregation, closed its wings, and then and there took up its quarters for the season. It was happily beyond the reach of the verger's broom, though under the eyes of the clergyman,—himself a naturalist, and there it hung, week after week, all the winter through. At length, on a warm Sunday in May, after a sleep of just nine months' duration, the little creature opened its wings again and fluttered down from its perch, "apparently as fresh in colour and condition as if just out of the chrysalis".

In the same way another of the race flew into a sitting-room in a little country town, one day during the hot weather of September, and finally established itself in the cornice, where for six long months it hung motionless. One fine morning in the following March it was fluttering at the window. The sash was lifted. The little creature dashed out into the sunshine, almost with the speed of a swallow.

A striking feature of the autumn garden some years is the multitude of sober-coloured moths hovering among the flower-beds, morning, noon, and night. The moths themselves not only do no harm in the garden, but are of no small service to the gardener by carrying pollen on their tufted heads from flower to flower, and thus unconsciously fertilising many a blossom that might otherwise have borne no seed at all. But it is quite otherwise with the caterpillars, insignificant but noxious little grubs, which, in some seasons, appear in such hosts as to devastate whole fields. In Germany it has been found necessary to use a machine, drawn by horses, to sweep up these caterpillars, which are collected from it in sacks and then destroyed.

The perfect insect, the commonest perhaps of all the moths, is a beautiful little creature, though there is nothing striking in its colouring. It is known as the "Silver Y," from a conspicuous mark on each of its front wings. Its scientific name of "Gamma" has been given to it from another and more learned reading of the letter.

It has been found very difficult to bestow a rational English "popular name" on each of the two thousand species of moths that inhabit these islands. Some of the names, indeed, appear almost, if not quite, meaningless, while some, on the other hand, are highly appropriate. The Humming-bird Hawk moth is marvellously like the bird whose name it bears, as every one must admit who watches it poise with outstretched trunk before a flower, on wings that move so swiftly that they show like a halo round it. Two other Hawk moths are called Elephants, but this is because of the strange-looking head of the caterpillar, which can be extended like a sort of dwarf proboscis. Another moth, the Death's Head, bears a skull and cross-bones on its back.

The moths of the large class known as Geometers are so called because the caterpillars, as they loop themselves along, have the air of measuring the space they traverse, as a man might span it with his hand. The Tiger is a moth of brilliant colouring. The Widow and the Old Lady are clad in sombre hues. The Quakers are mostly dressed in soft shades of sober brown, while the sixteen varieties of Footmen wear among them almost as many varieties of livery.

Such names might, indeed, give rise to misconception. We can well understand the feelings of the old market-woman who, toiling up the steep path through the wood with her eggs and butter, overheard a party of schoolboys talking over their captures of the day. We can picture her dismay as she heard one youngster describe how he had chased a small Elephant through the wood, and just missed capturing a Tiger. We can imagine her alarm at hearing another boy boast of having killed two Quakers and a Footman. And how, at a distant shout from another member of the party that he had just knocked down an Old Lady, she dropped her basket and fled for her life.

But of all the signs in Nature's calendar that mark, like figures on a dial, the movement of the seasons, there is none more certain, none more full of mournful augury, than the passing of the birds.

Their going is secret, silent; they vanish unseen and unheard. We have learnt much in recent years with regard to migration. With one single exception, we know where every one of the summer migrants goes to rear its brood. The haunt of one only—the curlew-sandpiper—still defies discovery. But there is as much cause for wonder as ever that the stork and the swallow observe the time of their coming. And how some birds contrive to find their way over vast stretches of unbroken sea is as great a mystery as when Anacreon saw the

or when the Hebrew watched the wandering hawk stretch her wings toward the south.

Among the few sounds that break the stillness of the autumn night is a faint and hurried cry, that at times may be heard out of the darkness—the note of some bird passing over unseen. It is the cry of the redwing—a feeble note, and yet the very trumpet-call of coming winter. In the spring the sight of the first swallow raises hopes of better times, of sunshine and warm weather. In autumn this voice calling out of the dark is a warning that cold and hunger are driving the redwing from its Northern home, that the Arctic night is settling down among the Norway hills.

Vast indeed is the array of these feathered fugitives. And if most of us see but little of plover or wild duck, of goose or swan or sandpiper, we may perhaps hear them as they pass. Often in the silence of these autumn nights, or even when the wind is blowing, we may hear the swift flight of the mallard overhead, or the musical voices of plovers; perhaps at times the trumpet-notes of geese, or even the whistling of the whooper's wings. Now and then, too, there floats down out of the starlit stillness the wild call of some unknown bird, the voice of some nameless stranger crying in the dark: