o get under cover
before the birds, if any lived there, should come home.

The oak-brush, which we then approached, is a curious and interesting
form of vegetation. It is a mass of oak-trees, all of the same age,
growing as close as they can stand, with branches down to the ground. It
looks as if each patch had sprung from a great fall of acorns from one
tree, or perhaps were shoots from the roots of a perished tree. The
clumps are more or less irregularly round, set down in a barren piece of
ground, or among the sage bushes. At a distance, on the side of a
mountain, they resemble patches of moss of varying shape. When two or
three feet high, one is a thick, solid mat; when it reaches an altitude
of six to eight feet, it is an impenetrable thicket; except, that is,
when it happens to be in a pasture. Horses and cattle find such scanty
pickings in the fields, that they nibble every green thing, even oak
leaves, and so they clear the brush as high as they can reach. When
therefore it is fifteen feet high, there is a thick roof the animals are
not able to reach, and one may look through a patch to the light beyond.
The stems and lower branches, though kept bare of leaves, are so close
together and so intertwined and tangled, that forcing one's way through
it is an impossibility. But the horses have made and kept open paths in
every direction, and this turns it into a delightful grove, a cool
retreat, which others appreciate as well as the makers.

Selecting a favorable-looking clump of oak-brush, we attempted to get in
without using the open horse paths, where we should be in plain sight.
Melancholy was the result; hats pulled off, hair disheveled, garments
torn, feet tripped, and wounds and scratches innumerable. Several
minutes of hard work and stubborn endurance enabled us to penetrate not
more than half a dozen feet, when we managed, in some sort of fashion,
to sit down, on opposite sides of the grove. Then, relying upon our
"protective coloring" (not evolved, but carefully selected in the
shops), we subsided into silence, hoping not to be observed when the
birds came home, for there was the nest before us.

A wise and canny builder is Madam Mag, for though her home must be large
to accommodate her size, and conspicuous because of the shallowness of
the foliage above her, it is, in a way, a fortress, to despoil which the
marauder must encounter a weapon not to be despised,--a stout beak,
animated and impelled by indi