One strangely sweet, strangely wild voice that you still may hear in our old apple orchards, is the whimpering, whinnying voice of the little screech owl. “When night comes,” says the bird book, “one may hear the screech owl’s tremulous, wailing whistle. It is a weird, melancholy call, welcomed only by those who love Nature’s voice, whatever be the medium through which she speaks.” Now listen this autumn for the screech owl; listen until the weird, melancholy call _is_ welcomed by you, until the shiver that creeps up your back turns off through your hair, as you hear the low plaintive voice speaking to you out of the hollow darkness, out of the softness and the silence of night. V You ought to hear the brown leaves rustling under your feet. “Heaped in the hollows of the grove, the autumn leaves lie dead; They rustle to the eddying gust, and to the rabbit’s tread.” And they should rustle to your tread as well. Scuff along in them where they lie in deep windrows by the side of the road; and hear them also, as the wind gathers them into a whirling flurry and sends them rattling over the fields. VI You ought to hear the cry of the blue jay and the caw of the crow in the autumn woods. “The robin and the wren are flown, but from the shrub the jay, And from the wood-top calls the crow through all the gloomy day.” Everybody knows those lines of Bryant, because everybody has heard that loud scream of the jay in the lonesome woods, and the _caw_, _caw_, _caw_ of the sentinel crow from the top of some tall tree. The robins may not be all gone, for I heard and saw a flock of them this year in January; but they are silent now, and so many of the birds have gone, and the woods have become so empty, that the cries of the jay and the crow seem, on a gloomy day, to be the only sounds in all the hollow woods. There could hardly be an autumn for me if I did not hear these two voices speaking--the one with a kind of warning in its shrill, half-plaintive cry; the other with a message slow and solemn, like the color of its sable coat. VII You ought to hear, you ought to _catch_, I should say, a good round scolding from the red squirrel this fall. A red squirrel is always ready to scold you (and doubtless you are always in need of his scolding), but he is never so breathless and emphatic as in the fall. “Whose nuts are these in the woods?” he asks, as you come up with your stick and bag. “Who found this tree first? Come, get out of here! Get right back to the city and eat peanuts! Come, do you hear? Get out of this!”