zing, drop by drop;
The leaves of life keep falling, one by one."_

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, o