50 THE NURSERY. 
‘skunk cabbage,’ and each branch and spray, 
draped with the black lichen (Lichen jubatus), 
seem mourning over death and decay on every 
side—in these damp solitudes lives the ‘ Store- 
keeper,’ merry and quarrelsome, as in brighter 
scenes. Climb the mountain-side, and scramble 
through the rock-walled ravine, where the pine 
clings to the stones rather than grows from 
their clefts; where no murmuring streamlet cools 
and refreshes thirsty Nature, or breaks the solemn 
silence with its rippling music; and not even 
the footfall of the savage disturb its echoes; and 
naught living, save the denizens of the air, that 
peep into its weird depths from the tree-tops, 
ever visits it: yet in the very loneliest of these 
glens the ‘ Store-keeper’ is sure to be met with. 
Climb on—higher, higher—to the perpetual snow- 
line, marking the boundary betwixt life and icy 
desolation; and there too, on the very frontier, he 
bounds, and jumps from rock to rock, ever 
scolding, laughing, whistling, and toiling, to 
garner in his harvest. 
Two of them, husband and wife, took up their 
abode in an old sawpit, close to our winter- 
quarters, at Fort Colville; and there constructed 
a nest, during the month of July, for the mamma 
to bring forth and rear her offspring in. I 
