es. There were nine of these hungry midgets,
and, like nine small boys, they not only were always hungry, but were
capable of digesting everything. They ate spiders and flies, green
worms, ants, millers, dirty brown worms, insect-eggs by the dozen,
devil's-darning-needles, woodlice, bits of lichen, grasshoppers, and
I know not how many other things. I could not help thinking that when
one family of birds destroyed such numbers of injurious insects, if
all the birds were to stop eating, the insects would soon destroy
every green tree and plant on earth.

One of the places where I used to camp to enjoy the flowers, the
trees, and the birds was on the shore of a glacier lake. Near the lake
were eternal snows, rugged gorges, and forests primeval. To its shore,
especially in autumn, came many bird callers. I often screened myself
in a dense clump of fir trees on the north shore to study the manners
of birds which came near. To help attract and detain them, I scattered
feed on the shore, and I spent interesting hours and days in my
hiding-place enjoying the etiquette of birds at feast and frolic.

I was lying in the sun, one afternoon, just outside my fir clump,
gazing out across the lake, when a large black bird alighted on the
shore some distance around the lake. "Surely," I said to myself, "that
is a crow." A crow I had not seen or heard of in that part of the
country. I wanted to call to him that he was welcome to eat at my
free-lunch counter, when it occurred to me that I was in plain sight.
Before I could move, the bird rose in the air and started flying
leisurely toward me. I hoped he would see, or smell, the feed and
tarry for a time; but he rose as he advanced, and as he appeared to
be looking ahead, I had begun to fear he would go by without stopping,
when he suddenly wheeled and at the same instant said "Hurrah," as
distinctly as I have ever heard it spoken, and dropped to the feed.
The clearness, energy, and unexpectedness of his "Hurrah" startled
me. He alighted and began to eat, evidently without suspecting my
presence, notwithstanding the fact that I lay only a few feet away.
Some days before, a mountain lion had killed a mountain sheep; a part
of this carcass I had dragged to my bird table. Upon this the crow,
for such he was, alighted and fed ravenously for some time. Then he
paused, straightened up, and took a look about. His eye fell on me,
and instantly he squatted as if to hurl himself in hurried flight,