The plover chuckles while he lingers at the bounteous feast of grasshoppers, but never pierces the August air with the long wail that proclaimed his springtime arrival. After nightfall, too, is heard his chuckling call fluttering down from the aerial path, where he wends his southward way, high and distinct above the shrill monotony of crickets and August pipers. The listening sportsman may well imagine that the departing bird is laughing at him as much as signaling his course to companion wayfarers. The woodland thrushes' flutes and bells have ceased to breathe and chime, only the wood pewee keeps his pensive song of other days, yet best befitting those of declining summer. The trees are dark with ripened leafage; out of the twilight of the woodside glow the declining disks of wild sunflowers and shine the rising constellations of asters. The meadow sides are gay with unshorn fringes of goldenrod and willow-herb, and there in the corners of the gray fences droop the heavy clusters of elderberries, with whose purple juice the flocking robins and the young grouse, stealing from the shadowed copses along this belt of shade, dye their bills. The brook trails its attenuated thread out of the woodland gloom to gild its shallow ripples with sunshine and redden them with the inverted flames of the cardinals that blaze on the sedgy brink. Here the brown mink prowls with her lithe cubs, all unworthy yet of the trapper's skill, but tending toward it with growth accelerated by full feasts of pool-impounded minnows. Here, too, the raccoon sets the print of his footsteps on the muddy shores as he stays his stomach with frogs and sharpens his appetite with the hot sauce of Indian turnip while he awaits the setting of his feast in the cornfields. The hounds are more impatient than he for the opening of his midnight revel, and tug at their chains and whimper and bay when they hear his querulous call trembling through the twilight. They are even fooled to melodiously mournful protest when their ears catch the shriller quaver of the screech owl's note. The woodcock skulks in the bordering alders, and when forced to flight does so with a stronger wing than when a month ago his taking off was first legally authorized. Another month will make him worthier game; and then, too, the ruffed grouse need not be spared a shot, as full grown and strong of pinion he bursts from cover; nor need the wood duck, now but a vigorous bunch of pin feathers, be let go untried or unscathed, when from his perch on a slanted log or out of a bower of rushes he breaks into the upper air with startling flutter of wings and startled squeak of alarm.