154 BEAUTIFUL BIRDS 
He was not called a hermit any more, after that, but 
those Humming-birds that had.called him one, and 
laughed at him when he was brown, were changed 
into hermits themselves. That is how there came to 
be Hermit Humming-birds in the world, and one of 
them is the one that surprised you so much when I 
described him to you, because he was all brown. 
They are all of them brown, but you must not laugh 
at them, for all that, even though they did at their 
brother. They have their punishment, and it is bad 
enough to be punished and made all brown, without 
being laughed at about it as well. 
Now, of course, as all the Hermit Humming-birds 
are brown, it would be no use to describe them to 
you, one at a time, like the others. Instead of that 
I will tell you about some more Humming-birds 
who are pretty, and who came to be what they are 
like now in some curious way or other, which had 
nothing to do with their having once been sunbeams. 
One of these is the Snow-cap. He is very small, 
almost as small as the smallest of the Humming- 
birds—and you know how small that is—and although 
he is not exactly brown, still he is not at all a bril- 
liant bird for a Humming-bird. What makes him 
so pretty is this. First, all the whole crown of his 
head is of a beautiful, pure, silky white, which makes 
it look as if a large, soft snowflake had fallen upon it, 
