30 EVERYDAY ADVENTURES 



bird which is never by any chance found in a tree. 

 In the distance a woodpecker flew through the air in 

 a labored up-and-down flight, and, as he disap- 

 peared, he gave the wild cry of the hairy woodpecker, 

 a bird nearly twice the size of his smaller brother, the 

 downy. Close by the side of the creek, we heard a 

 tiny note like "pheep, pheep, pheep," and, even as 

 we looked for the bird, it flew past and lit on a tree 

 on the other side of the path, not two feet away. We 

 all stood stony still, and in a minute a brown creeper 

 circled the tree, climbing it in tiny hops in a wide 

 spiral. He was so close that we could see his stiff, 

 spiny tail with a little row of spots at its base, and the 

 brown and gray speckles on his back, and his long 

 curiously curved bill. 



We pressed on into the very heart of the great, 

 treacherous marsh, to-day frozen hard and safe, and 

 explored all of its secret places. In a tangle of wild- 

 grape vine, we found the round nest, rimmed with 

 grape-vine bark, of the cardinal grosbeak; while 

 over in a thicket of elderberry bushes, all rusty-gold 

 with the clinging stems of that parasite, the dodder, 

 showed the close sheath of the fine branches of a 

 swamp maple. In a fork at the end of one of the 

 branches, all silver-gray, was the empty nest of a 

 goldfinch, the last of all the birds to nest. It was 

 made of twisted strands of the silk of the milkweed 

 pods hackled by the bird's beak. In the snow, we 

 came across a strange track almost like the trail of a 

 snake. It was a wide trough, with little close-set, 

 zigzag paw-marks running all through it. The Cap- 



