round and retreat, nor was
there room for him to pass me. Realizing all this in an instant, I
snatched up my belongings, and hurried to get out before he should get
in.

When I emerged, the chat set up his loudest and most triumphant shouts.
"Again we have fooled you," he seemed to say; "again we have thrown
your poor human acuteness off the scent! We shall manage to bring up our
babies in safety, in spite of you!"

So indeed they might, even if I had seen them; but this, alas, I could
not make him understand. So he treated me--his best friend--exactly as
he treated the nest-robber and the bird-shooter.

I shall never know whether that nest contained eggs or young birds; or
whether perchance there was no nest at all, and I had been deceived from
the first by the most artful and beguiling of birds. And through all
this I had never once squarely seen the chat I had been following.

"Even yet thou art to me
No bird, but, an invisible thing,
A voice, a mystery."

XX.

ON THE LAWN.

The first thing that strikes an Eastern bird-student in the Rocky
Mountain region, as I have already said, is the absence of the birds he
is familiar with. Instead of the chipping sparrow everywhere, one sees
the lazuli-painted finch, or the Rocky Mountain bluebird; in place of
the American robin's song, most common of sounds in country
neighborhoods on the Atlantic side of the continent, is heard the silver
bell of the towhee bunting, sometimes called marsh robin, or the harsh
"chack" of Brewer's blackbird; the music that opens sleepy eyes at
daybreak is not a chorus of robins and song-sparrows, but the ringing
notes of the chewink, the clear-cut song of the Western meadow-lark, or
the labored utterance of the black-headed grosbeak; it is not by the
melancholy refrain of the whippoorwill or the heavenly hymns of thrushes
that the approach of night is heralded, but by the cheery trill of the
house wren or the dismal wail of the Western wood-pewee.

Most of all does the bird-lover miss the thrushes from the feathered
orchestra. Some of them may dwell in that part of the world,--the books
affirm it, and I cannot deny it,--but this I know: one whose eye is
untiring, and whose ear is open night and day to bird-notes, may spend
May, June, July, yes, and even August, in the haunts of Rocky Mountain
birds, and not once see or hear either of our choice singing thrushes.

However the student may miss the birds he knows at home, he m