A quick, sharp whistle surprises you from the herbage near by, and a striped chickaree skips across the leaves and dives into his burrow at the foot of an old stump not far away. There are various other sounds that come to you if you sit quietly in a beech wood. Now it is a tiny footfall, a pat-pat upon the leaves, and a little brown bird is seen, hopping in and out among the undergrowth, scratching and pecking like a little hen among the leaf mould. Then comes a galloping sound, and you know there is a scampering hare somewhere about. And at last a peeping frog gains confidence, and starts up a trill somewhere behind you. He is soon joined by another, and still others, until a chorus of the shrill voices echoes among the trees, some from the around, some from the limbs overhead; and if you only sit perfectly still, you may hear a venturesome voice, perhaps, at your very elbow; for these little peepers are capricious songsters, and only sing before a quiet, attentive audience. Now a silly green katydid flits by, like an animated gauzy leaf; and quick as thought a kingbird darts out from the leaves overhead, hovers in mid-air for a second, and is away again; and luckless katydid wishes she _hadn’t_. See the variety of beeches, too! Here are slender, dappled stems, clean and trim; and others, great giants with fluted trunks and gnarled roots, and with eccentric limbs reaching out in most fantastic angles; but all spreading above in a graceful, airy screen of intermingled tracery and sunlight, where slender branches bend and sway beneath the agile squirrel as he leaps from tree to tree, and the leaves clatter with the falling nuts. Behind us a soft fluttering of many wings betrays a slender mountain-ash, with its drooping clusters of berries, growing in an open, rocky space near by--where a flock of cedar birds assemble among the fruit, or scatter away amid the evergreens at your slightest movement. Turning your head in another direction, you can follow the course of an old farm-road that leads out upon a bright clearing, thick-set with light-green, feathery ferns. A few rods beyond, it makes a sudden downward turn through a dense grove of lofty pines and hemlocks. Here are “dim aisles” where dwell perpetual twilight--where no ray of sun has entered for well-nigh a century--only, perhaps, as it is brought down in a glistening sunbeam within the crystal bead of balsam upon some dropping cone. There is a solemn stillness in these stately halls, in which your very footfall is proscribed and hushed in the depths of the brown and silent carpet. There are old, venerable gray-beards here, and fallen monarchs lying prostrate among the rugged rocks; and here and there among the brown debris a fungus lifts its head, to tell of other generations that lie crumbling beneath the mould. Now among the lofty columns, like a magnificent illuminated window in some vast cathedral, comes a glimpse of the outer world with its autumn