270 THE RUBY-CROWNED KINGLET. 
cheep. ‘These emphatic notes are also rendered in a detached form at oc- 
casional intervals, usually after the entire song has been rehearsed; and they 
are so loud at all times as to be heard at a distance of half a mile. One indi- 
vidual began his song with an elaborate preliminary run of high-pitched, 
whining notes of a fineness almost beyond human cognizance; then effected a 
descent by a kititew note to the tew tew tew series. In his case, also, the em- 
phatic closing notes had a distinctly double character, as cheépy, cheépy, cheépy. 
We ransacked the Newport woods day after day with feverish eagerness, 
allured and goaded by the music, but filled also with that strange fire of 
oological madness which will lead its possessor to bridge chasms, dangle over 
precipices, brave the billows of the sea, battle with eagles on the heights, or 
crawl on hands and knees all over a forty-acre field. The quest was well-nigh 
hopeless, for the woods were dense and the tamaracks were heavily draped 
in brown moss, “Spanish beards,” with a thousand possibilities of hidden nests 
to a single tree. June the First was to be the last day of our stay, and it 
opened up with a dense fog emanating from the Pend d’Oreille River hard-by. 
Nevertheless, six o'clock found us ogling thru the mists on the crest of a 
wooded hill. A Ruby-crown was humming fragmentary snatches of song. 
and I put the glasses on him. I was watching the flitting sprite with languid 
interest when Jack exclaimed petulantly, ““Now, why won't that bird visit his 
nest?” “He did,’ I replied, lowering the binoculars. The bird in flitting 
about had paused but an instant near the end of a small fir branch about 
thirty-five feet up in a sixty-foot tree, springing from the hillside below. 
There was nothing in the movement nor in the length of time spent to excite 
suspicion, but it had served to reveal thru the glasses a thickening of the 
drooping foliage, clearly noticeable as it lay outlined against the fog. 
’ We returned at ten o’clock and the first strokes of the hand-ax, as the 
lowermost spike bit into the live wood, sent the female flying from the nest 
into a neighboring tree. As the ascent was made spike by spike, she uttered 
a rapid complaint, composed of notes similar to the prefatory notes of the 
male’s song; but during my entire stay aloft she did not venture back into the 
nesting tree, nor did the male once put in an appearance. The nest was only 
five and a half feet out from the tree trunk, and the containing branch an 
inch in thickness at the base. Hence, it was not a difficult, albeit an anxious, 
task to support the limb midway with one hand and to sever it with a pocket- 
knife held in the other, then to haul it in slowly. 
The nest was composed largely of the drooping brown moss, so common 
in this region as to be almost a necessity, yet contrasting strongly with the 
clean bright green of the young fir tree. But, even so, it was so thoroly con- 
cealed by the draping foliage that its presence would have escaped notice 
from any attainable standpoint, save for the mere density,—a shade thicker 
than elsewhere. At first sight one is tempted to call it a moss-ball, but close 
