WAYSIDE RAMBLES. 17 
Many, many a cunning bird prank would have 
been missed had I kept, like the majority of pedes- 
trians, to the beaten track. ‘There, for example, 
is that odd little genius in mottled robes, the brown 
creeper, who has performed a sufficient number of 
quaint gambols to repay me for all the time and 
effort expended in pursuing my wayside rambles. 
He is always swz generis, apparently priding himself 
on his eccentricities, like some people you may 
know. A genuine arboreal creeper, he almost in- 
variably coasts up hill. Unlike his congeners, the 
nuthatch and the creeping warbler, he never goes 
head-downward. Dear me, no! Whether it is 
because it makes him light-headed, or he regards 
it as bad form, I am unable to say. He does not 
even hitch down backward after the manner of the 
woodpeckers, but marches up, up, up, until he 
thinks it time to descend, which he does by taking 
to wing, bounding around in an arc as if he were 
an animated rubber ball. You may almost imagine 
him saying: “Pah! such vulgar sport as creeping 
head-downward may be well enough for mere 
plebeians like the nuthatches and the striped 
creepers, but it is quite beneath the caste of a 
patrician like myself! Zseem/ tseem/” At rare 
intervals he will slip down sidewise for a short 
distance, in a slightly oblique direction, especially 
when he comes to a fork of the branches. 
However, he does not think it beneath his dignity 
to take a promenade on the under side of a hori- 
zontal bough. One day as I watched him doing 
2 
