e dead stalks sticking up
through them served as sentry posts, from which the old birds scolded me
when I followed too close on their heels. The youngsters sometimes
appeared on the stalks, and looked very pert on their long legs with
their short tails cocked over their backs.

In the afternoon I went again to see the little family to which I had
become so much attached and which were now slipping away from me. They
had been led farther up the canyon, where, at a turn in the dry bed of
the stream, the thick cover of weeds was still more protected by brush
and overhanging trees, and the whole thicket was warmed by the afternoon
sunshine. The old birds were busily flying back and forth feeding their
invisible young. They scolded me as they flew past, but kept right on
with their work.

There was little use trying to keep track of the brood after that, and I
thought I had given them up quite philosophically, reflecting that it
was pleasant to leave them in such a sunny protected place. Still, day
after day in riding along the line of sycamores on my way to other
nests, it gave me a pang of loneliness to pass the old deserted wren
tree where I had spent so many happy hours; and though the sycamores
were silent, I could always hear and see the little lover singing to his
pretty mate.

III.

LIKE A THIEF IN THE NIGHT.

WHEN watching the little lover and his brood, I heard familiar voices
farther down the line of oaks, voices of little friends I had made on my
first visit to California, and had always remembered with lively
interest as the jauntiest, most individual bits of humanity I had ever
known in feathers. So, when Mountain Billy and I could be spared by the
other bird families we were watching, we set out to hunt up the little
bluish gray western gnatcatchers.

The (sand) stream that widened under the wren's sycamores narrowed up
the canyon to a--dry ditch, I should say, if it were not disrespectful
to speak that way of a channel that once a year carries a torrent which
excavates canals in the meadows. Billy and I started up this sand ditch,
so narrow between its weed-grown banks that there was barely room for
us, and so arched over in places by chaparral that we could get through
only when Billy put down his ears and I bowed low on the saddle.

[Illustration: Nest of Western Gnatcatcher.

(From a photograph.)]

We had not gone far before we heard the gnatcatchers, bluish gray mites
with heads that a