If there is anything in the old saying that a plentiful berry harvest foretells a hard winter, then have we bitter times in store. The hedges are loaded with scarlet wherever you go, and yet in all this flaunting brilliance there seems to be no two shades of red alike The holly-berries approach more nearly than any to pure vermilion. Then come the hips, the rose-berries, with their tawny red; and the haws that are richer of hue than all others, perhaps, yet of a sombreness that quietens the eye for all its glow. Ruddy are the bryonies and the bittersweet. The rowans love to hold aloft their masses of pure flame, the rich rowan-colour that is always seen against the sky. Along the edge of the hazel copse, where the butcher’s broom grows, its curious oblong fruit gives another note of red. But they are all essentially different colours. Nature often duplicates herself in blues, yellows, and particularly in a certain shade of pale purple, of which the mallow is a common type. But among red flowers, red berries, finding one, you shall not find its exact counterpart in hue in all the country-side. In southern England, the general lurid effect due to change of leafage in the forest trees belongs of right to November, but already there are abundant signs of what is coming. Though the woods, on a distant view, still look gloriously green, a nearer prospect reveals a touch of autumn in almost every tree. In the beech-woods nearly all the branches are tipped with brown. The elms have bright yellow patches oddly dispersed amidst foliage still of almost summer-like freshness. The willows by the river are full of golden pencillings. Only the oaks remain as yet uninfluenced by the changing times. The temperate autumn nights, that have checked the sap-flow of less hardy things, have had no influence on the oak-woods. They wait for the first real frosts—the knock-down blow. And strangely, though October is nearing its end, the frosts do not come. The nights are still, moist, dark; and full of the twanging note of dorbeetles, and now and again the steady whir of passing wings. This is the sound made by the hosts of migrant birds, all journeying southward, travelling in silence and by stealth of night.