38 BIRDS. 



the silent brown bird as she darts quickly away; 

 but step three paces in the wrong direction, and 

 <7our search will probably be fruitless. My friend and 

 1 found a nest by accident one day, and then lost it 

 again one minute afterward. I moved away a few 

 yards to be sure of the mother-bird, charging my 

 friend not to stir from his tracks. When I returned, 

 he had moved two paces, he said (he had really moved 

 four), and we spent a half hour stooping over the 

 daisies and the buttercups, looking for the lost clew. 

 We grew desperate, and fairly felt the ground all over 

 with our hands, but without avail. I marked the 

 spot with a bush, and came the next day, and with 

 the bush as a centre, moved about it in slowly 

 increasing circles, covering, I thought, nearly every 

 inch of ground with my feet, and laying hold of it with 

 all the visual power that I could command, till my 

 patience was exhausted, and I gave up, baffled. I be- 

 gan to doubt the ability of the parent birds themselves 

 to find it, and so secreted myself and watched. After 

 much delay, the male bird appeared with food in his 

 beak, and satisfying himself that the coast was clear, 

 dropped into the grass which I had trodden down in 

 my search. Fastening my eye upon a particular mea- 

 dGW-lily, I walked straight to the spot, bent down, and 

 gazed long and intently into the grass. Finally my 

 eye separated the nest and its young from its sur- 

 roundings. My foot had barely missed them in my 

 search, but by how much they had escaped my eye 1 

 could not tell. Probably not by distance at all, but 

 simply by unrecognition. They were virtually in- 

 visible. The dark gray and yellowish brown dry 

 grass and stubble of the meadow-bottom were exactly 

 copied in the color of the half-fledged young. More 



