There were not many mushrooms any more, but we gathered gay red berries for decoration, bunches of late fern, sprays of bittersweet; we raked over the leaves for nuts, and sometimes found bits of spicy wintergreen or checkerberry, the kind that always flavored old-fashioned lozenges which our grandmothers bought in little rolls for a penny, on the way to school. You may guess that this was pleasant play to us who for ten years had known only city or suburban life at this season, and not the least pleasant part of it was the quiet noise the leaves made as we strode through them, the _fruis-sas-se-ar_, as the French of the Provence call it, and the word as they speak it conveys the sound. Astride a stick horse, of which on our new back porch she kept a full stable, the Joy went racing this way and that, kicking high the loose brown drift of summer, stirred to a sort of ecstasy by its pleasant noise and the spicy autumn air. The November woods had fewer voices than those of the earlier season, but there was more visible life. Many of the birds remained, and they could no longer hide so easily. A hawk or an owl on a bare bough was sharply outlined. Rabbits darted among the trees, or stood erect, staring at us with questioning eyes. Squirrels scampering over the limbs gave exhibitions of acrobatic skill. There were two kinds of squirrels--the fat gray ones, of which there were not many, and the venomous little red ones, of which there seemed an overproduction. They were cute little wretches, but we did not care for them. They were pugnacious pirates; they robbed their unmilitant gray relative and chased him from the premises. Earlier in the season they had thrown down quantities of green nuts to be wasted, and we were told they robbed birds' nests, not only of their eggs, but of their young. Those red rovers had no food value, or they would have been fewer. They were a mere furry skin drawn over a bunch of wires and strings, and not worth a charge of powder. V _Deer--wild deer--on our own farm!_