But it is the larger butterflies that first catch the eye, such as the monarch and the viceroy, the fritillaries, fox-red and black, with trimmings of silver; the red admiral, and other anglewings, beautiful in outline as well as in colors; the delicately pretty meadow-browns, and the magnificent swallowtails and mourning-cloaks.
Don't you think it would be interesting and delightful to study these exquisite creatures?
III
AUTUMN
It is a bright warm day in October; and once more, as we go for our ramble, everything seems changed. The autumn flowers are blooming, the autumn tints are in the leaves; and again there are different animals, and different birds, and different insects almost everywhere around us.
We hardly take ten steps before there is a sudden commotion in a clump of tall grass by the path, and a red-backed mouse leaps almost over our toes and dives down a little hole which otherwise we should not have noticed. Doubtless he carried a mouthful of grass-seeds to add to his granary under ground. All over the country mice and gophers and squirrels are doing the same thing. There's a big gray squirrel, now, scratching a hole in the ground as busily as a terrier who thinks he smells a mole. Suddenly he stops, drops a hickory-nut into the little grave, paws the dirt and leaves over it, pats them down, and canters away. All day he is burying nuts so that when, next winter, the trees are bare, he may dig them up and feed upon their meat. Sometimes he doesn't need to, or forgets, and then a tree may spring up. Many a fine hickory or chestnut was planted in this way by squirrels.
CHICKADEE AND WHITE-BREASTED NUTHATCH.
What is that red squirrel doing under the chestnut-tree by the side of the lane? He is hard at work collecting chestnuts, stuffing his big cheeks with them and carrying them away to hide for use next winter. He seems to realize that although he will sleep in his bed under the stone fence almost the whole time from Thanksgiving to Easter, he will wake up now and then, on warm days, and will feel dreadfully hungry. But then there will be little to be found in the way of food. So he is now gathering nuts and acorns and dry mushrooms, and hiding them away so as to be prepared. Some he puts in a hole in the trunk of a tree, others in crevices in the stone wall; others he takes into his hole underground, where his cousin, the saucy chipmunk, stores all of his savings.
Notice how the pretty little animal uses his bushy tail as he scampers along a branch. Do you see that he holds it stretched out behind him, and keeps on turning it slightly first to one side and then to the other? The fact is that it helps him to keep his balance. When a man walks upon the tight rope he generally carries in his hands a long pole, which is weighted at each end with lead. Then if he feels that he is losing his balance, he can almost always recover it again by tilting up his pole. The squirrel's tail serves him as a sort of balancing-pole, and by turning it a little bit to one side, or a little bit to the other, he can run along the slenderest branches at full speed without any danger of falling.
Everywhere we go we hear the whirring of grasshoppers, the chirping of black crickets, and the shrill declarations of the katydids. A blind man who could not see the scarlet of the maples, the deep crimson and purple of sumachs, the pepperidge and the blackberry thickets, or the golden glow in the birches as the sunlight strikes through them, would know the season of the year by the sounds.