In the beechwood the split covers of the mast crushed under the feet, the leaves were crisped and curled. No cunning of sculptor in copper could fashion such as these. The beech tree is indeed the aristocrat of the forest, for it is superb at the fall. No leaves possess such a rich colour or have the appearance of majesty and preserved form. The elm leaves are drab and lifeless, the oak leaves blotched and frayed; from the horse chestnut the big green splayed leaves are either withered and rusted or drop when seemingly full of sap. The elderberry and the ash loosen their sprays at the first singe of autumn’s fire. But gradually dyed a deep golden-brown, and untouched by fungus or blight, the leaves of the beech preserve their outline and take on a silkiness and shining of surface. Seen against the blue sky the veins and arteries of each leaf are clear-cut and distinct; no degeneration in the beech tree. During the autumn the numerous summer tenants of the wood have quitted. There is silence in the cold air. Old and twisted, the beech trees have yielded generations of leaves uncurling from torch-like windings when first the swallows come across the sea; the rooks built in their massy summer greeneries; woodpeckers hewn a nesting place in the rotten boles, spreading a whiteness of chips on the moss beneath; starlings with wings of metallic gleaming stolen their old trysts, and jackdaws nested where the branches had decayed and gaped. Far down across the fields yonder the rooks are following the plough. The jackdaws have joined them, and as light ebbs at evening they will return in a long stream to the rookeries. The starlings haunt the water-meadows, the mocking cry of the green “gallypot” is heard no more. Walking quietly through the solitude of the wood the wanderer may see a squirrel storing his granaries with mast and acorns, working earnestly lest the frost come early and bind the earth till the sun of March shall solve its graven pattern. From the edge of the wood the field slopes downwards to the longpond, now covered with a haze in the sunshine. The rushes fringing its edge are rusted and bent like old Roman swords, the reeds like the spears of ancient Britons, thrown with Arthur’s sword, into the lake. By the pebbled shore the water is pure and clear and gloomy, the sunlight showing the moist brown velvet of the leaves upon its bed. Quietly feeding in the centre, a dozen moor-hens send ripples to the side, each wavelet bearing a shifting line of light over the leaves as it travels forward. Yonder the sallows have loosened their slips of leaves and the sunshine throws up their ruddy and yellow wands--broken segments of a rainbow trembling by the marge. A wren goes by, a fluttering moth of a bird, silent; sipping and twittering in sweet cadences a flock of goldfinches passes over towards the patch of thistledown in the meadow. A chuckling, rattling sound; the fieldfares and redwings have arrived from Scandinavian forests.