s way to the
grazing herd in the gully, shadowed the ground about him for an instant.

"Look-see! look-see!" he called plaintively, rolling his eyes and
ruffling his throat; "look-see! look-see!"

But the flock, dipping and rising in swift flight, sped on unheeding.
The long summer day was drawing to a close over the prairie, and with
early evening myriads of gnats and mosquitos swarmed up from the sloughs
to drink their fill on the flanks of the stamping cows. The insects
offered a fat supper to the birds as they clung to the twitching hides
of the cattle. So the flock was hastening to reach the gully before
milking-time.

The young cowbird called disconsolately again and again after the shadow
of the flock was far away, making a moving blot across the darkening
plains. Then, discouraged, he tucked his head under his wing, clutched
the stone more tightly with his claws, and rocked gently back and forth
as the soft south breeze spread his tail, lifted his growing pinions,
and blew his new feathers on end.

He was a tramp and the descendant of a long line of tramps, all as black
and hoarse and homeless as himself. A vagabond of the blackbird world,
he had, like many an unfeathered exile, only sleep to make him forget
his empty craw, and only a wayside rock for his resting-place.

He had been an outcast from the beginning. One day in the spring his
tramp mother, too shiftless to build a home for herself, had come
peeping and spying about the fuzzy nest of some yellow warblers that had
built in an elder-bush by the river; and finding the birds away, had
laid a big white egg speckled with brown in the midst of four dainty
pale-blue ones that were wreathed with tiny dots. Then she had slipped
away as quickly as possible, abandoning her own to the more tender
mercies of the little canary pair.

It was the warblers' first nesting, or they would have known, the moment
they saw the large egg among their small ones, that they had been
imposed upon, and would either have pushed the interloper out or built
a second story to their home and left the cowbird's egg in the basement.
But they were young and inexperienced, so they had only wondered a
little at the size and color of their last lay, and let it remain.

The weeks had passed. Then, one day, there had been a great chattering
about the warm cup of milkweed fiber and thistle-down in the elder-bush,
husky cheeping from the nest mingling with the joyous chirps of the
mothe