nd whose ways would be somewhat mysterious. But the American
representative of the family is a bird of different manners. Unlike his
namesake across the water, our cuckoo never--or so rarely as practically
to be never--shirks the labor of nest-building and raising a family. He
has no reason to skulk, and though always a shy bird, he is no more so
than several others, and in no sense is he a mystery.

There is, however, one American bird for whom Wordsworth's verse might
have been written; one whose chief aim seems to be, reversing our
grandmothers' rule for little people, to be heard, and not seen. To be
seen is, with this peculiar fellow, a misfortune, an accident, which he
avoids with great care, while his voice rings out loud and clear above
all others in the shrubbery. I refer to the yellow-breasted chat
(_Icteria virens_), whose summer home is the warmer temperate regions of
our country, from the Atlantic to the Pacific coast, and whose
unbirdlike utterances prepare one to believe the stories told of his
eccentric actions; this, for example, by Dr. Abbott:--

"Aloft in the sunny air he springs;
To his timid mate he calls;
With dangling legs and fluttering wings
On the tangled smilax falls;
He mutters, he shrieks--
A hopeless cry;
You think that he seeks
In peace to die,
But pity him not; 't is the ghostly chat,
An imp if there is one, be sure of that."

I first knew the chat--if one may be said to know a creature so shy--in
a spot I have elsewhere described, a deserted park at the foot of
Cheyenne Mountain. I became familiar with his various calls and cries
(one can hardly call them songs); I secured one or two fleeting glimpses
of his graceful form; I sought and discovered the nest, which thereupon
my Lady Chat promptly abandoned, though I had not laid a finger upon it;
and last of all, I had the sorrow and shame of knowing that my
curiosity had driven the pair from the neighborhood. This was the
Western form of _Icteria_, differing from the Eastern only in a greater
length of tail, which several of our Rocky Mountain birds affect, for
the purpose, apparently, of puzzling the ornithologist.

Two years after my unsuccessful attempt to cultivate friendly relations
with "the ghostly chat," the middle of May found me on the shore of the
Great Salt Lake, where I settled myself at the foot of the Wasatch
Mountains, at that point bare, gray, and unattractive, showing m