Later, in the full heat of the afternoon, when the thermometer stood at eighty degrees, I stood by the side of a long, straight country road leading north and south. One monarch butterfly after another was soaring along this road, seemingly not in haste, but making, nevertheless, a speed of six or seven miles an hour. And every one of them was heading due south on the trail of the one ahead, as if in a game of follow-your-leader. Was the leader a wise old butterfly who had made the long southern road before, and were these others monarchs of this year’s growth following him that they might reach the goal in safety? Someone wiser than I may answer this, but if he does I shall ask him how he knows. The _Anosia plexippus_, which is another name for the monarch, has fluttered about this road all summer long, never going outside his usual round from one flower clump to another. The cold snap of three days before may have wakened primal instincts in him and sent him on his southern migration, just as these may have set the _Pyrameis_ to fluttering about the clubhouse, where there might be sheltered spots in which to try to pass the winter in safety. Or the compelling force may have been something entirely different. Who can ever know? All along the borders of the swamp the witch-hazel is working out its peculiar and mysterious destiny. It is not this belated summer day, however, that has brought out its fragrant yellow blossoms. They unfolded just as cheerfully in the killing frost of three nights ago. Witch-hazel nuts are ripe now, the witch-faced husks splitting open and showing the glossy black kernels within, about as big as an apple seed, shaped like the enticing black eyes of the witch herself. All among these nuts grow the scrawny blooms, sending out a delicate fragrance which is as soft and fragile as that of early spring flowers,--a refined and pleasing scent that brings a thought of far-away apple blossoms. Yet on this sunny day you may not catch this odor unless you put your face close to the flowers, for the vigor of the sun draws up the smell of tannin from all the dry leaves underfoot till the whole world seems a tea factory. Should the rustle of these leaves in the light autumn breeze be the silken swish of trailing Oriental garments, and slant-eyed people appear under pyramid hats and begin to gather them and pack them in chests marked with strange pencilings like those on the end of a red-winged blackbird’s egg, I for one would not be surprised. The blackbird himself is an Oriental mystic in disguise, and he marks the names of his children in Chinese characters round the big end of each egg. The next time you look into a blackbird’s nest you notice if this is not so.