Rock Wren the Clitf Dweller 



By P. B. Peabody 



HOW strangely beautiful is that law of Nature whereby to him that hath- 

 not is given. In human haunts most of beauty flocks by itself : in the 

 great out-of-door world Beauty and the Beast lie down together. On the 

 gaunt sage plains of the West the whilom traveller, sipping his after-dinner 

 sherbet in the buffet-car, marvels not a little at the manifest and unmitigated 

 hideousness of things. u Ugh,what adesolate country!" he murmurs to himself, 

 with a small frown upon his blase face; and then he turns to his morning pa- 

 per to scan the latest skit concerning frenzied finance. But the tall, cleai-eyed 

 cow-boy, habiting the desert to hide a heart-ache, has learned the wilderness 

 better. Stripping the saddle from his hot horse, at the end of a mad chase 

 after the stampeding bunch of recently landed dogies he drops the reins be- 

 neath the shade of a scanty bull-pine at edge of a curious, uptilted, far-reach- 

 ing sand-stone moraine; lies down upon the still-cool reaches of bare shale, 

 and listens, with every sense acute, to an odd little song that breaks the si- 

 Jence from one lift of the rock, a hundred yards away. He has never learn- 

 ed the name of that bit of a brown-grey bird that slips so coyly from crevice 

 to crevice, accentuating every shift with fresh iteration of his little lay: 

 "Heever, hee-ver, hee-ver", comes the clear, small note, — u Heever, hee-ver; 



hee-ver, ler-zee, ler-zee, ler-zee, tzee-h'l, tzee-h'l, tzee-h'l, tzee-h'l," — 



and then a little pause. Finally, after many iterations of these and other 

 like vocal whimsies, there comes creeping out upon the still air a soft, whis- 

 pered yet marvelously pervasive sound; an awesome attack upon the ear- 

 nerves almost as creepy as the muttered "pur-r-r-r-v' 1 of the solitaire: U S' jee- 



e-e-e-e-us, s 1 jee-e-e-e-e-us, s' je-e-e-e-e-e-us", — steals out the trickling 



sound. And while the Rock Wren disappears behind the corner of his favor- 

 ed singing rock, only to appear, instantly, upon another, intent on similar 

 devices, the cow-boy flicks the corner of one eye down to the one poor little 

 black sage bush beside him; to learn whether there be not coiled there, 

 emitting that creepy sound, that loathsome enemy of beast and man: the rat- 



