38 BIRDS. 
the silent brown bird as she darts quickly away, 
but step three paces in the wrong direction, and 
your search will probably be fruitless. My friend and 
I found a nest by accident one day, and then lost it 
again one minute afterward. I moved away a few 
yards to be sure of the mother-bird, charging my 
friend not to stir from his tracks. When I returned, 
he had moved two paces, he said (he had really moved 
four), and we spent a half hour stooping over the 
daisies and the buttercups, looking for the lost clew. 
We grew desperate, and fairly felt the ground all over 
with our hands, but without avail»), I marked the’ 
spot with a bush, and came the next day, and with 
the bush as a centre, moved about it in slowly 
increasing circles, covering, I thought, nearly every 
inch of ground with my feet, and laying hold of it with 
all the visual power that I could command, till my 
patience was exhausted, and I gave up, baffled. I be- 
gan to doubt the ability of the parent birds themselves 
to find it, and so secreted myself and watched. After 
much delay, the male bird appeared with food in his 
beak, and satisfying himself that the coast was clear, 
dropped into the grass which I had trodden down in 
my search. Fastening my eye upon a particular mea- 
dow-lily, I walked straight to the spot, bent down, and 
gazed long and intently into the grass. Finally my 
eye separated the nest and its young from its sur- 
roundings. My foot had barely missed them in my 
search, but by how much they had escaped my eye I 
could not tell. Probably not by distance at all, but 
simply by unrecognition. They were virtually in- 
visible. The dark gray and yellowish brown dry 
erass and stubble of the meadow-bottom were exactly 
copied in the color of the half-fledged young. More 
