ripe. By listening one may hear the bird at its work, and by slipping quietly in 

 the dusk of the early morning to the lowlands, or the thick woods, and standing 

 stock-still for a while, even see it. But nearly always it is under cover on the 

 edge of thickets, where the leafmold is unstirred and richest. And always by 

 its own self is the hermit, as if it loves nature better than the company of its 

 fellows, listening now and then for underground or overhead sounds, and dwelling 

 on the beauty of the leaf skeletons it overturns like a botanist. 



Lace-work and dainty insertion in delicate threads does Madam Hermit 

 find in her resorts — fabric so marvelous and fascinating she could admire it 

 forever; cast-off finery of such insects as outgrow their clothes, grasshopper 

 nymphs, and whole baskets full of locusts' eggs hidden in half-decayed logs, and 

 making a nourishing breakfast, "rare done" and delicious. She delights in the 

 haunts of the praying-mantis at egg-laying season, surprising the wonderful 

 insect in her devotions, who scarcely has time to turn her head on her foe before 

 she disappears from sight. 



It is well for her thus to disappear suddenly, for she is spared witnessing 

 the fate of her newly laid eggs just above her on the twig, their silken wrapper 

 being no obstruction in the way of Madam Hermit finishing her meal on them. 

 These habits of the hermit-thrush mark the dwarf-hermit in southern 

 California. We see it in the orange-groves after irrigation or during a wet 

 winter. Plenty of mulching in the orchards invites the dwarf (where it is a 

 hermit like its relative), and we find it scratching away in the litter, overturning 

 frail little toadstool huts and umbrellas, and exchanging greetings with its neigh- 

 bor, the varied thrush, under the next tree. 



Here in the cations, where the brooks turn right side up for one brief season 

 in the long, dry year, we see the little olive-brown bird with its speckled breast. 

 Its sight and hearing are keen, so that it detects the whereabouts of the stoneflies, 

 lingering among the moist rocks until they come out for a drink or a bath, when — 

 that is the last of them. 



The dwarf brown beauty, which, of course, must have victuals by hook or 

 crook, never breaking a single law in either case, loves the watery haunts of 

 the dragon-flies. 



It passes by the pupa-skin drying on its leaf-stalk just as it was outgrown, 

 with perchance a glance at the reflection in the water; but the cunning bird 

 neglects not to take in the pupa itself, making its own breakfast on undeveloped 

 mosquitoes in the water's edge. 



All winter long about our home lives the dwarf hermit, eating crumbs at 

 the garden table and looking for belated raspberries on the ever-green canes. 

 Early, before the sun is up, the bird runs along under our windows, where the 

 myrtle covers the tracks of night insects, and rings its tinkling notes. These 

 resemble the familiar bell-notes that belong to the woodthrush, cousin of the 

 hermit and the dwarf hermit. 



Not so numerous as its relatives, the wood-thrush is seen only in Eastern 



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