156 IN BIRD LAND. 
clambered far up their steep sides. Perhaps the 
mountain-climber would think them tame. It made 
my head swim that evening to see a towhee bunting 
dart from a copse near by and hurl himself with reck- 
less abandon down the declivity, as if there were not 
the slightest danger of breaking his neck or dashing 
himself to pieces. He stopped just in time to 
plunge into another thicket for which he had taken 
aim. 
As the sun sank, I seated myself on the grass far 
up the steep, and looked down on the beautiful 
valley below me. ‘There was the broad Ohio, wend- 
ing its way between the sentinel hills, the green 
clover fields and meadows smiling good-night to the 
sinking sun, and the brown ploughed fields with their 
green corn-rows. A wood-thrush mounted to a dead 
twig at the very top of a tall oak some distance 
below me, and poured forth his sad vesper hymn, 
so bewitchingly sweet and far-away ; the while Ken- 
tucky warblers and cardinal grossbeaks piped their 
lullabies or madrigals, as they chose, from the dark- 
ling woods; and, altogether, it was a never-to-be- 
forgotten evening. 
An early morning hour found me climbing the ac- 
clivity and mounting to the top of the hill. Ina 
clover-field the gossamer Zse-e-e of the grasshopper 
sparrow, a birdlet among birds, pierced my ear. 
Presently a pair of these sparrows were seen on the 
fence-stakes, and, yes, one of them had a worm in 
its bill, indicating that there were little ones in the 
neighborhood. If I could find a grasshopper spar- 
