Nature-notes and impressions : in prose and verse / by Madison Cawein [electronic text]

All around me in the wind-tossed woods patter the nuts; heard suddenly

each nut is as startling as the fall of an unexpected footstep. Chestnut, acorn, hickory and beech nut, how they rain! shaken each one from its infirm hold by every breeze that sweeps the wood. Mast, with which the agile squirrel stores his winter granary, snug in the top of some old and hollow tree.

The birds seem to be all gone away; at least, if present, they are silent; all except two—the crow and the jay, who are never weary of cawing and screaming, making the woods noisy with their cries, the one trying to outdo the other in ridicule and vituperation.

In the underbrush, flitting secretly, silently, searching apparently for its mate, dead with the summer, I beheld a grosbeak, warm-looking in its plaid suit of brown and black and red and gray. Soundlessly it vanished, suddenly disappearing, visible a moment,

then gone in the hush of the autumn woods—was it a bird or only the ghost of one?