When waiting for the gnats to do something, I heard a little sound in the oak brush by my side, and, looking through the brown branches, saw a wren-tit come hopping toward me. It came up within three feet of me, near enough to see its bright yellow eyes. I began to wonder if it had a nest near by, and felt my prejudices melting away and my heart growing tender. Some thieves are very honest fellows; it is largely a difference in ethical standards! I began to feel a keen interest in the bird and its affairs, for the wren-tit was really a most original bird, and one I was especially anxious to study.

My newly awakened interest was not chilled by any second tragedy; all went well with the little blue-grays. The day the gnat's eggs hatched, the old folks performed most ludicrously. Perhaps they were young parents, and this being their first brood, maternal and paternal love had not yet blinded their eyes to the ridiculous; so that they looked down on these skinny, squirming, big-eyeballed prodigies with mingled emotions. It looked very much as if they were surprised to find that their smooth pretty eggs had suddenly turned into these ugly, weak, hungry things they did not know what to do with. At first it seemed that something must be wrong at the nest; the little gnat shook her wings and tail beside it as if afraid of soiling herself; and when she hopped into it, jerked out again and flitted around distractedly. Every time the birds looked into the nest they got so excited that, had they been girls, they surely would have hopped up and down wringing their hands. I laughed right out alone in the brush, they acted so absurdly.

They began feeding the nestlings in the most remarkable way I had ever witnessed. When the young mother was on the nest her mate came and brought her the food, whereupon, instead of jumping off the nest and feeding the young in the conventional way, she simply raised up on her feet and, apparently, poked the food backwards into the bills of the young under her breast! Even when the gnats got to feeding more in the ordinary way, they did it nervously. They fed as if expecting the young to bite them. They would fly up on the branch beside the nest, give a jab down at the youngsters, whip tails and flee. You would have thought the young parents had been playing house before, and their dolls had suddenly turned into live hungry nestlings.

I watched this family till the house was deserted, and I had to ride along a line of brush before finding them. The young were now pretty silvery-breasted creatures who sat up in a small oak while the old birds hunted through the brush for food for them. Though I rode Billy into the chaparral after them, and got near enough to see the black line over the bill of the father bird, they did not mind, but hunted away quite unconcernedly; for we had been through many things together, and were now old and fast friends.

V.

LITTLE PRISONERS IN THE TOWER.

I had not spent many days in The Little Lover's door-yard before realizing that there was something in the wind. If an inoffensive person fancies sitting in the shade of a sycamore with her horse grazing quietly beside her, who should say her nay? If, at her approach, a—feathered—person steals away to the top of the highest, most distant oak within sight and, silent and motionless, keeps his eye on her till she departs; if, as she innocently glances up at the trees, she discovers a second—feathered—person's head extended cautiously from behind a trunk, its eyes fixed on hers; or if, as she passes along a—sycamore—street, a person comes to a window and cranes his neck to look at her, and instantly leaves the premises; then surely, as the world wags, she is quite justified in having a mind of her own in the matter. Still more, when it comes to finding chips under a window—who could do aught but infer that a carpenter lived within? Not I. And so it came about that I discovered that one of the apartments in the back of the wren sycamore had been rented by a pair of well-meaning but suspicious California woodpeckers, first cousins of the eastern red-heads.

California Woodpecker.
(One half natural size.) 		Red-headed Woodpecker—Eastern.
(One half natural size.)