Blue-jays loiter down the old road, making short flights from tree to tree, moving in the one plane and with slowly beating wings; only rarely do they fold their wings and dip.  Redheads and flickers, like the other woodpeckers, have a slightly dipping flight.  They open and close their wings in quick succession, not slowly like the goldfinches; consequently their dips are not so pronounced.  The line of their flight is a ripple rather than a billow.

Chickadee and his family come chattering through the pasture.  They had a felt-lined nest in a fence-post during the warm days of June; now they find life easy and sweet—­sweet as the two notes mingled with their chatter.  Upside down they cling to the swaying twigs, romping, disheveled bird-children, full of fun and song-talk.  It is nothing to them that the cruel winds and deep snows of winter will be here all too soon.  Summer days are long and joyous, life stretches out before them; why waste its hours with frets and fears about the future?  Another round of merry chatter and away they flit.  Scarcely have they gone until a blood-red streak shoots down from the elm tree to the grass.  It is the scarlet tanager.  For the last half-hour his loud notes, tied together in twos, have been ringing from an ash tree in the pasture, near the spreading oak where the mother sat so closely during June.  Though the nesting season is over he will sing for some weeks yet.

So they come and go through the happy golden hours; now the nasal notes of the nuthatch or the “pleek” of a downy woodpecker in the pasture, followed by the twittering tones of the chimney-swifts zigzagging across the sea of blue above, like busy tugboats darting from side to side of a harbor.  Crows string over the woods close to the tops of the trees, watching with piercing eyes for lone and hapless fledglings.  A cuckoo droops from a tall wild cherry tree on one side of the road to a tangle of wild grape on the other; he peers out and gives his rain-crow call.  So is the warp of the summer woven of bird-flight and threaded through with song.

* * * * *

When evening comes the sun’s last smiles reach far into the timber and linger lovingly on the boles of the trees with a tender beauty.  Wood-flowers face the vanishing light and hold it until the scalloped edges of the oak leaves etched against the sky have been blurred by the gathering darkness.  Long streams of cinnabar and orange flare up in the western sky.  Salmon-colored clouds float into sight, grow gray and gradually melt away.  In the dusky depths of the woods the thrush sings his thrilling, largo appassionato, requiem to the dying day.  In this part of the thicket the catbirds congregate, but over yonder the brown thrashers are calling to each other.  The “skirl” of the nighthawk ceases; but away through the woods, down at the creek, the whippoorwill begins her oft-repeated trinity of notes.  A hoot owl calls from a near-by tree.  The pungent smoke