troupes of them dance in little gusts of wind. On frosty nights the nuts drop with soft patterings. Squirrels slip, brown and gray shadows, over the bright carpets, laying in their winter stores. The song birds take their last meals of seeds and cocoon babies and fly southward.
October is the time to study the fruits of forest trees. Many of the trees—the willows, poplars, elms and red maples drop their seeds in the spring. The rock maple keeps its seed until frost, and so do all the nut trees and the wild orchard fruits. All the maple seeds have two thin, flat green wings, like a thumb screw, an inch or more across. In the thickened bases of the two wings, two seeds lie coiled. You can peel away the thin, paper-like covering and find them. And you can learn how they begin to grow by pulling up the smallest seedlings of the red maples.
Acorns lie thick under the oak trees. They will tell you the names of the parent trees. But keep very still and the squirrels will tell you some things. The gray and brown squirrels and the little striped chipmunks will pass some acorns by, but will pick up others eagerly and scamper away with them. Up the trees they go, or into hollow logs or holes in the ground, to their hidden store-rooms. They like the sweet acorns of the white, the chestnut and the live oaks. They have to be very hungry before they eat the bitter nuts of the black, the red and the bur oaks. How can they tell them apart?
Very likely all acorns look alike to you. They all have a shiny, brown shell with a white "eye" where they grew fast to the cups. The acorn of the white oak has a very rough, mossy cup much shorter than the pointed nut. The bur oak is often called the over-cup oak because its mossy, fringed cup covers quite two-thirds of the round acorn. In the live oak of our southern states, the cup tapers back to the twig, broadens at the top and almost encloses the acorn. The red oak has a shallow cup, more like a saucer, the scaly ring just clasping the long oval acorn. The scarlet oak acorn is top shaped, with a point for spinning, and is half covered with a shaggy cap of a cup, like a tam-o-shanter. There are other oaks, with acorns that are still different, but these are the best known.
Chestnuts are very near relatives of the oaks, The cups are closed burs, very stiff and woody, with prickly thorns. You have to let Jack Frost open them for you. He can split them into four leaves lined with brown velvet, and make you a present of three dark brown, flattened nuts with silky tails. They are very sweet when
