WITH BROWN PREDOMINATING 267 
silence for one moment that I might hear the wonderful 
song! The twitter of the young was clearly audible 
from where I sat, twenty feet away, and the melody of 
the father bird’s rhapsody rang clearly over the noise 
of the rapids, but there must have been half tones lost 
in the tumult that were even sweeter than the notes 
that reached my ears. His song ended, into the water 
he plunged where the current was swiftest and where a 
strong man could not venture and live. Yet the bird 
flew upstream against it as easily as if in the air 
alone. 
In feeding the young, both adults hovered just below 
the entrance to the nest, as a humming-bird beneath a 
flower, darting up with a little bound to deliver the 
food. The queer-looking larvee were evidently picked 
up on the bottom of the river, but did not, I am sure, 
belong to any species of mosquito, for each was an inch 
and a half long and seemed to have many legs, like 
a scorpion. These constituted fully half of the food 
brought, and the rest was too small to be accurately 
identified. One or the other of the adults came to the 
nest as often as every ten minutes during the week that 
I watched them, and at times the intervals were much 
shorter. They invariably approached the nest in the 
same way, alighting first on a smaller rock whose top 
just broke the surface into foam, dipping and winking 
awhile on it, and hopping to the projecting splinter on 
the trunk, whence, after more dipping and winking, they 
fluttered over to the nest. The little Ouzels never ap- 
peared in the doorway until the parent had come to the 
