The humming bird, the swallows, the purple martins, the chimney swifts, also seem to be a-pilgriming. Gradually you become conscious that all of them are flying southward, always down the stream and never up. The first keen blasts up in the northland have given them a warning and they are going steadily, happily, but for the most part silently, on down the stream, giving rare beauty to these halcyon days of late summer; on past the farthest point of your vision, where the silver gray mist softens the outline of the forest-crowned headlands, and lavender shadows hang gently across the valleys; always on and on towards the land where all is light and life and where summer ever abides in beauty. You look up and see flocks of cowbirds flying in the same direction and still larger flocks of night hawks, hundreds of them in the air at once. Like the queens on the mournful barge of the fallen King Arthur, their mission is to escort the dying summer floating down, always down _"To the island valley of Avilion; Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow, Nor ever wind blows loudly; but it lies Deep-meadowed, happy, fair with orchard lawns And bowery billows crown'd with summer sea._ You can climb to the highest cliff and look down to where the creek valley blends with the valley of the river, standing as did Sir Bedivere where he _... saw Straining his eyes, beneath an arch of hand, Or thought he saw, the speck that bare the king Down the long water opening on the deep, Somewhere far off, pass on, and on, and go From less and less and vanish into light."_ The summer which has just been escorted down the valley shall come again. You remember that even the mourners after the passing of Arthur, when the first keen pangs of sorrow were over, took heart again. This was the verse they carved on his tomb: _"Hic jacet Arthurus Rex Quondam Rex, que Futurus."_