What have birds and blossoms to do with such a dreary outlook? This was evidently the tenor of my friend’s thought, although he said nothing more. To him, as it was raining hard, the world was unutterably dreary, and he longed for the crackling blaze upon the andirons which he knew awaited us. In a few moments, as we skirted a bit of woodland, I remarked: “Blue jays are a feature of this month. See! here are half a dozen.” They were very tame and full of merry ways. They hunted the leaf-strewed ground and played bo-peep among the lower branches of the oaks. They screamed, laughed, chattered, and at times uttered that peculiar flute-like note which sounds so strangely in the woods, particularly when the silence of midwinter broods over all. My friend forgot that it was a dull November day. These dandies in their cerulean suits can do no mischief now, and I love them for their vivacity. Their cunning shows out continually, and it needs not the dictum of the naturalist to learn that they are cousins of the crow. That they lived so largely upon eggs during May and June told against them at the time, and they were then the incarnation of fiendishness. Let the dead past bury its dead. One can not be happy who is ever cherishing dislikes, and I find the blue jay of the present sufficient unto November days. For my part, he is right welcome to the woods as he finds them. While the six merry jays were before us, I picked a violet, a bluet, and a daisy, and offered them as proof that November blossoms were not a myth. There are, I assured my friend, more than a score of flowers to be found by a little careful searching. What, then, if Summer’s glory has departed; if her skies are no longer overhead; her songs no longer fill the air; the odor of her blossoms no longer scent the breeze; is it not a poor wheel that can not spare one spoke? Nature is not so niggardly with her gifts in November as summer tourists, for instance, are apt to suppose. November is comparatively bare, it is true, and positively ragged; but it is not always safe to judge a man by his coat.