Flocks of grackles spend their days in the cornfields which run down to the creek bottom and their nights amid the wild rice and the rushes and willows in the swamp. In the timber fringes and the broad bottoms along the creek you get glimpses of the catbird feasting on the grapes and the wild plums; the brown thrasher and the woodthrush, wholly silent now; the little house wren who has lost her chatter; the vireos and the orioles, the wood pewee, the crested fly catcher and the kingbird. They all seem to be going southward. There are a few nests and young birds in the early part of the month—the yellow-billed cuckoo, the Savannah sparrow, the goldfinch. But these are exceptions to the general rule.
Little flocks of warblers flit among the tree tops and the bushy margin of ponds near the creek will soon be alive with the myrtle warblers—as numerous as English sparrows in a barn-yard. In the night time you may hear the "tseep" of the warblers as they wing their way swiftly towards the southland. Sometimes there is the tinkling sound of the bob-o-link, also flying in the night time, and in the morning there may be a flock of them in some meadow, leisurely getting their breakfast after their all-night flight, chattering to each other in the tinkling tones which are unlike any other song-talk in bird land.
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."
And the soul of the summer cannot die. In many a grateful heart it lives forever as a gentle memory of loveliness and sweetness and of inspiration to higher and better things. Neither shall it lose its individuality; for it has bestowed its peculiar charms, its own enlargements of knowledge, its rare enrichments of faith and hope; they were fuller and richer than those of any other summer. As the senses reach farther into the science of each summer, and the mind lifts the veil of Isis and sees a little farther into the harmony of her purposes, so the heart draws closer to the heart of the summer and receives a larger benediction, an essence of immortality, an ambrosial food richer and more real than that which sustained the ancient gods. And herein is hope for the race. It cannot be but that each summer, with its recollections of walks and talks with parents and friends in the summers long gone by, with its sweetest memories of life and love, with its mighty tides of growth and splendor, its wistful dreamy skies in these last days of its loveliness—it cannot be but that each summer warms many a heart with the thrill divine, lifts many a life to a plane of fairer vision and nobler purpose, instills a desire for a life more in keeping with its own strength and cleanliness and beauty. So does each summer help the world onward to
"That far-off divine event
To which the whole creation moves."