There are many symbols on the dial of Nature to mark the changing of the year. Such signs are the brightening colours of the meadows, and the growing hosts of insect life. Such a sign is the strange, noonday silence of the woodland; and such, too, is the change in the cuckoo's cry—faltering, even before the longest day. Such signs are the gathering of the swallows, the purple mist on the plumed reeds by the river, the blackberry clusters ripening fast along the hedge-row, the butterflies that flutter in through the open windows, seeking already some dark nook in which to hide themselves in good time before the setting in of winter.

But plainer even than these, for most of us at any rate, is the altered tone of the hedge-rows—ever ready to answer to the influence of the sunshine. It is under the hedge-row that spring leaves her fairest traces—violets white and blue, and primroses, with their soft, delicate perfume. May crowns the thickets with the foamy fragrance of the hawthorn. June studs the long briar sprays with sweet wild roses, fairest of all flowers of summer. And now, again, these hot summer days are lending new beauty to the country lanes; not of flowers or of fresh young foliage, but of mellow leaves and gleaming berries.

There is a special charm about these old West Country lanes, worn, sometimes, by the clumsy wheels and toiling feet of many centuries, deep down below the fields on either hand; lanes that lead perhaps to nowhere, or that lose themselves in the meadows; lanes that in our fathers' time were, it may be, King's highways, and that now grass-grown and neglected, with deep ruts and broadening hollows, where water lies in winter, are known only to the birds'-nester, or to village children in quest of nuts or blackberries. For most of us these quests are but memories of childhood. Most of us can but echo the lament of the poet:

And yet, perhaps, though the feast of to-day is for the eye rather than the palate, we welcome as keenly as we ever did, nutting time, or days of blackberry harvest. We think less of the rich, ripe clusters, no doubt, but we are more alive to the beauty of the leaves, of the red stems that show so well among the green shadows, of the withering foliage, torn and ragged, yet touched in the autumn with gold and russet and fiery crimson.

The old yew yonder, by the church on the hillside, under whose broad shadow so many centuries of village folk have gathered week by week, when service was over, to talk of the haying, and the weather, and even, it may be, of the business of their neighbours, stands out a dark, funereal mass against the grey masonry behind it. A nearer view would show that its heavy green is relieved by a thousand points of gold, not yet wholly tarnished, but at this distance they are lost in the surrounding gloom. The copper beeches by the manor house, that of late gleamed like metal in the brilliant sunshine, are darkening into black. The larch plantations, marshalled in well-ordered phalanx along the old road half up the hill, have long since lost their freshness, and the leaves of this great pollard oak, whose maimed boughs throw a shadow none too wide, are bright no longer.

For centuries has the old tree cooled its knotted roots in the black earth of this swampy hollow. Signs of age are only too plain to read. The furrowed bark has been split away in patches, revealing underneath the galleries of wood-boring creatures; and the old trunk is scarred with pits that the wood-peckers have been digging, searching for fat white beetle grubs, or for the evil-smelling caterpillar of the goat-moth. And just below the pollarded branches there is a woodpecker's hole, whose well-worn threshold suggests years of occupation.

Round the broad base of the tree marsh plants are growing—spearwort and water-plantain, broad blades of iris, and cool green plumes of marestail. In the long grass of the field that stretches far on either hand, there are crimson spikes of orchis, pale marsh valerian, and bright ragged robin, and here and there nods a white plume of early cotton grass. It is a mere thread of water that, loitering slowly through the meadow, seems to pause round the roots of this old tree; the very slenderest of streams. Even the reedy hollow where it steals along, a broken line of silver, lost at times among sedges and brooklime and strong meadow grasses, is hardly noticed as it wanders idly through the field. Yet the birds know it well. Here the snipe lie in the hard weather. Here, too, in winter, you may watch the water-rail stealing in and out among the leafless thickets, through the jungle of dead stems of fig-wort, and hemlock, and tall hemp agrimony. On the black mud of the shore you may trace to-day the light footprints of the wagtails that have their lodging in a cranny of the ruined mill in the next meadow, the broad sign manual of the moorhens whose nest is nearer still, and the tracks of many a water-loving bird beside.

And, though the listening ear can but just catch the faint tinkle of the tiny ripples that fret among the hemlock stems, there is as much life along this little streamlet as by the mill pool yonder, though the rumble of the old wheel and the plash of the mill-race seem louder, even at this distance, than the low murmur of these tiny waves. There, among the rafters of the boat-house, the swallows build, and white-breasted martins have their nests under the broad eaves of the mill. But it is here, by this oozy margin, that they find the clay to frame their dwellings.

The moorhen rides in company with the little fleet of ducks upon the pool, though she draws hastily away when the miller lounges through the door to open the sluice, her nodding head keeping time to the quick beating of her paddles. But it is here that she hides her nest. It is behind the stems of that hazel bush, close down by the stream. Last night, when the old bird went off with a splash like a water-rat, there was just light enough to count the seven eggs. But now, when you steal quietly up, there is no old bird on guard. No eggs are in the nest. It is filled to the very brim with something dark, like a black shadow. All at once, as you stand peering down at it from the farther shore, hardly a yard away, the shadow breaks into fragments that struggle over the edge and plunge down into the water—seven fluffy little balls of sable down, each with a touch of scarlet for a beak; seven bold young moorhens, making their first venture into the great world; argonauts born, paddling along the diminutive reaches of their tiny river, and scrambling away into the green jungle on the shore with a skill and readiness that is the heir-loom of untold generations.

The sedge-warbler, too, loves the reedy fringe of the mill pond, and he never shows to more advantage than when he balances on one of those tall spears of bulrush. But his nest is here, in yonder bush, whose foliage the cows have cropped so close. A strange song is his, copied now from the skylark, and now from the swallow; and now again you might think that a party of house-sparrows were having a real good gossip down by the water.

Sparrow-like, too, is the note of a bird that sits motionless on the topmost twig of a maple tree that leans over the brook. His shape and his smart plumage, the flatness of his head and the rich red brown of his back, mark him for a shrike, a butcher-bird. He, too, is fond of this quiet corner. Year after year his mate and he come back to the hawthorn bush below the maple, to repair the great nest in which so many families have been reared. On a broad flat stone that serves for a bridge over the meadow ditch near by are strewn some broken snail shells and a half-eaten cockchafer. But that was not his doing. If you look closely at the bush below his perch, the bush that shelters his well-hidden nest, you may discover the butcher-bird's "larder;" may see spitted on the long thorns that help to guard his dwelling, beetles, or bees, or even a young bird, or, it may be, a dragon-fly, who surely must have been taken unaware, since with those strong gauzy wings it is said he can distance even the swallow in his swift career.

A man with a pail slung on his shoulder, and with a milking stool in his hand, comes slowly out from the farm buildings, a dog following at his heels; a dog grey and shabby and unkempt, of breed altogether past description. But he is a master of his art, mongrel though he be. The man points to a group of cattle in the far corner of the field. At once the dog goes off to bring them in, heading and turning, and then urging them gently homeward, with marvellous skill and patience, encouraged now and again by his master's strange and inarticulate shouts. A troop of goslings is grazing in the middle of the field, goose and gander standing sentinel at either end of the extended line. The old birds sound a challenge as the dog goes by, and lower their silly heads, and hiss and charge at him; while he, his mind set wholly on the business of the moment, canters past unmoved. An angry gander is by no means an antagonist to be despised. There is something particularly irritating, too, in the style of the attack. We can hardly wonder at the village urchin who, having been sorely harassed as to his unprotected legs by vicious digs of the old bird's beak, tried to soothe his wounded feelings by stoning at long range the unoffending goslings, blubbering out in mingled pain and rage to the indignant farmer who presently seized on him red-handed: "What for they goschicks' fayther bite I, then?"

Round the old farm yonder, whose weather-stained roofs and walls half ruinous just show among its clustering trees, there is a picture of quiet autumn life. In the spacious stack-yard a party of labourers, whose sunburnt faces glow against the green background of the trees like so many round red autumn suns, are standing about a great waggon, tossing hay to men at work on the fast-growing ricks of new, sweet-smelling aftermath. It is an ancient homestead. A thousand summers, it may be, has hay been cleared from these broad meadows. A thousand times, at the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, have the sheaves been piled in this old stack-yard. The hamlet of three houses is little changed, either in name or character, since the days of Edward the Confessor, when Brictric held it, paying geld for one hide of land; when two villeins, with as many boors and serfs, made up all its scanty population. A pleasant place, this warm autumn afternoon, is the hollow at the back of the farm; a broad space of level grass land, once an orchard, and with a few forlorn old apple trees still standing in it; bordered on one side by a green lane, and on the other by a broken line of hedge-row, through whose wide gaps the thistles and brake-fern are marching down like caterans from the hills, bent on reconquering the pasture-land and turning it once more into a wilderness. All round it rise the hills, robbing it of some hours of sunshine indeed, yet sheltering it from every wind that blows. Just showing over a steep brow above are the white houses of a hill-side village, once in the heart of a great mining field—the very place Macaulay had in view when he described how

The mines have long been deserted. But here and there among the villages you still may happen on some son of the soil, some time-worn and bent and wrinkled patriarch, who, in his young days, dug for ore among these hills; who remembers the time when a miner, working here for his own hand, could earn a sovereign a day. But although the miners have been gone these fifty years, the whole country side is seamed and scarred with traces of their old workings. There are fields on this farm where the ground is so broken with heaps of rubbish from the pits, and so full of barely-covered shafts, that the land is almost valueless. But there are no buildings to spoil the landscape. There was no machinery but the windlass and the bucket. And here, as ever, Nature has done her best to hide the traces of man's ravages. The heaps of stone and earth she has changed to grassy knolls, covered them with lotus and burnet and scented clusters of the thyme, and scattered over them little clumps of dark campanula. Under her kindly touch the stony shafts are turned to bowery hollows, green with moss and stone-crop, and long plumes of fern.

A bird-haunted spot is this little hollow in the hills. The clump of old Scotch firs looking down from the hill-slope yonder is the harbour of crow and magpie, ever the hangers-on of a West Country farm. The straggling hedge-rows that part these broad fields are full of empty nests. Here, among the red fruit of rowan and whitebeam, the ring-ousel lingers on his southward journey. In this old apple tree, whose withered arms are hung for once with fruit, like little golden balls, is a woodpecker's hole, with marks of the maker's tool about it yet. That stately oak tree, springing straight and tall in the line of the old hedge-row—touched above with a hundred points of light where the pale green acorns hang, and laced below, across its drooping branches, with silver lines of gossamer—is a resting place for all the birds of the air. In the spring the cuckoo alights upon its topmost crown and calls his name to all the neighbourhood. From its leafy crest the magpie looks down, meditating another raid upon the hencoop. The brown squirrels too, love to frolic in its dim green shadows, playing hide and seek among the branches, and racing headlong down its wrinkled bark to scamper over the short turf of the meadow. At this moment two linnets on its topmost spray are filling the air with such a chorus of sweet notes and breezy chattering that you might think a score of birds were in the tree.

The sun is sinking low. The shadows of the hedge-row elms are stealing far down the grassy slope. Sparrows that have been gleaning in outlying stubble-fields are flying home to roost in the ivy on the old barn wall, or in the sides of the stacks, or in snug tunnels that they have made for themselves in the thatched roof of their thankless lord and suzerain:—quarters infinitely cleaner and sweeter and more wholesome altogether than those of their smoke-blackened cousins in the city. The sun is down. A soft blue mist is gathering in the red heart of the pines. And now