50 BY-WAYVS AND BIRD-NOTES. 
Its architectural powers are of the poorest. 
No other of our arboreal birds, not even the 
common dove, builds so crazy and insecure a 
home. But I am getting into rather deep or- 
nithological mire. It is so easy to find room 
for digression when one gets out-of-doors ! 
Everything is suggestive. To the vision of a 
careful observer and student each object in na- 
ture has an interrogation-point beside it. With 
pencil and note-book let us catalogue these 
suggestions and interrogations, and lay them 
aside for future use. When, some day, we 
come to look them over we shall be surprised 
how perfectly—like dried roots and plants— 
they have kept their out-door fragrance and 
taste. 
IT. 
In studying the birds most usually met with 
on out-door excursions I have found it very in- 
teresting to make notes of certain striking evi- 
dences of a special harmonic relation between 
their movements, colors, and attitudes, and 
the peculiarities of their natural surroundings. 
Ornithologists have over and over again 
rung the changes on the ease with which the 
quail, the grouse, and the hare make them- 
selves next to invisible to the human eye, and 
to the piercing vision of birds of prey as well; 
but there are many curious details connected 
with this subject of a natural harmony of mo- 
tion and color, regarding birds and their envi- 
ronments, which I have never seen in print. 
Of course, since the quail, the hare, and the 
grouse have been for so long the objects of 
desire of sportsmen, pot-hunters, and epicures, 
