quickly. But she
didn't budge. She couldn't. It was a part of her camouflage trick to sit
still in danger. The greater the danger, the stiller to sit! She even
kept her eyes nearly shut, until, when the man had cut the last and
nearest end of wire and put all his things together in a pile ready to
take down, he came to look over the edge of the roof-wall. As he bent to
do this, he brushed suddenly against her.

Then Mother Nomer sprang into the air; and the man jumped, in such
surprise that, had it not been for the wall, he would have fallen from
the roof. It would be hard to tell which was the more startled for a
moment--man or bird. But Mother Nomer did not fly far. She fell back to
the roof some distance from her precious babies and fluttered pitifully
about, her wings and tail spread wide and dragging as she moved lamely.
She did not look like a part of the pebbly roof now. She showed
plainly, for she was moving. She looked like a wounded bird, and the
man, thinking he must have hurt her in some way, followed her to pick
her up and see what the trouble was. Three times he almost got her.
Almost, but not quite. Crippled as she seemed, she could still fumble
and flutter just out of reach; and when at last the man had followed her
to a corner of the roof far from her young, Mother Nomer sprang up, and
spreading her long, pointed wings, took flight, whole and sound as a
bird need be.

The man understood and laughed. He laughed at himself for being fooled.
For it wasn't the first time a bird had tricked him so. Once, when he
was a country boy, a partridge, fluttering as if broken-winged, had led
him through the underbrush of the wood-lot; and once a bird by the
river-side stumbled on before him, crying piteously, "Pete! Pete!
Pete-weet!" and once--Why, yes, he should have remembered that this is
the trick of many a mother-bird when danger threatens her young.

So he went back, with careful step, to where he had been before. He
looked this way and that. There was no nest. He saw no young. The little
Nomer twins were not the son and daughter of Mis, the clown, and Mother
Nomer, the trick cripple, for nothing! They sat there, the little
rascals, right before his eyes, and budged not; they could practice the
art of camouflage, too.

[Illustration: _The little rascals could practise the art of
camouflage._]

But as he stood and looked, a wistful light came into the eyes of the
man. It had been many years since he had fo