oked
down anxiously, I put the pair on my calling list. It did not take many
visits to prove my conclusion--there was a nest down in the well with
white eggs in it. The ph[oe]bes were most trustful birds, and not only
let Canello tramp around their yard, but when a pump was put down the
well, and water pumped up day by day, the brave parents, instead of
deserting their eggs, went on brooding as if nothing had happened.

[Illustration: Black Ph[oe]be.

(One half natural size.)]

[Illustration: Eastern Ph[oe]be.

(One half natural size.)]

Five years later, on going back to the ranch, I found the ph[oe]bes
around the old place, but hunted in vain for the nest. A schoolhouse had
been built in the interval, near the old adobe, and the birds perched on
its gables, on the hitching posts in front of it, and on my prune-trees,
that had taken the place of the willows, across the road. They even came
up to my small ranch-house and filled me with delightful anticipations
by inspecting the beams of the piazza; but they could not find what they
wanted and flew off to build elsewhere. Later in the season, a neighbor
whose ranch was opposite mine showed me a ph[oe]be's nest inside his
whitewashed chicken house. It was a mud pocket like a swallow's, made of
large pellets of mud plastered against a board in the peak of the house.
Of course I could never prove that these birds were my old friends, but
it seemed very probable.

The smallest of my tenants was a hummingbird. I saw it fly into a low
spray, and it stayed there so long that when it left I rode up to look,
and found that it was building on the tip of a twig under a sycamore
leaf umbrella, one whose veining showed against the light. By rising in
the saddle I could just reach the twig and pull it down to look inside
the nest; but afterwards I found so many other hummers who could be
watched with fewer gymnastics, I rested content with knowing that this
little friend was there.

One morning, when on the way to the sycamores, I found an oriole's nest
high in a tree. Canello was hungry, but when permitted to eat barley
under the branches kept reasonably quiet. There were two species of
orioles in the valley; and not knowing to which the nest belonged, I
prepared to wait for the return of the owner. The heat was so oppressive
that I took off my hat, and a bird flew into the tree with bill open,
gasping. After my hot ride down the valley the shade of the big tree was
very gra