In the branches overhead are chestnut-loving blackbirds, every one with a crack in his voice. Far away a crow is cawing, and from another direction a jay screams. These speak to the world at large. Half the township may hear what they have to offer. I like them; may their speech never be a whit softer or more musical; but if comparisons are in order, I give my first vote for less public--more intimate--birds, such as speak only to the grove or the copse. And even as I confess my preference, a bluebird’s note confirms it: a voice that caresses the ear; such a tone as no human mouth or humanly invented instrument can ever produce the like of. He has no need to sing. His simplest talk is music. Here, by the wayside, a few asters have sprung up after the scythe, and are freshly in flower. How blue they are! And how much handsomer a few stalks of them look now than a full acre did two months ago. So acceptable is scarcity. There is nothing to equal it for the heightening of values. It is only the poor who know what money is worth. It is only in October and November that we feel all the charm of _Aster lævis_. I think of Bridget Elia’s lament over the “good old times” when she and her cousin were “not quite so rich.” Then the spending of a few shillings had a zest about it. A purchase was an event, a kind of festival. I believe in Bridget’s philosophy; for the asters teach the same; yes, and the goldenrods also. They, too, have come up in the wake of the scythe, and still dwarfed, having no time to attain their natural growth, as if they knew that winter was upon them, are already topped with yellow. I carry home a scanty half handful of the two, asters and goldenrods, as treasure-trove. They are sure to be welcome. When all the fields were bright with such things, they seemed hardly worth house-room. This late harvest of blossoms is one small compensation for all the ugliness inflicted upon the landscape by the habit--inveterate with highway “commissioners”--of mowing back-country roadsides. As if stubble were prettier than a hedge! Now I pass two long-armed white oaks, which I never come near without thinking of a friend of mine and of theirs who used to walk hereabouts with me; a real tree lover, who loves not species, not white oaks and red oaks, but individual trees, and goes to see them as one goes to see a man or a woman. This pair he always called the twins. They have summered and wintered each other for a hundred years. Who knows--putting the matter on grounds of pure science--whether they do not enjoy each other’s companionship? Who knows that trees have no kind of sentience? Not I. We take a world of things for granted; and if all our neighbors chance to do the same, we let the general assumption pass for certainty. If trees _do_ know anything, I would wager that it is something worth knowing, something quite as good as is to be found in any newspaper.