8 



Gbe Warbler 



ROCK WREN NEST UNDER SLOT OF SANDSTONE ON STEEP HILLSIDE 



tier. Then the cow-boy softly laughs, way down in his throat : " Just 

 beauty and the beast," — he murmurs to his cayuse. One pictures thus the 

 Rock Wren as at least a whilom bird of the rocky margins of the plains. 

 And the picture is utterly true to nature. Not only, moreover, does the 

 male Rock Wren thus occur as a sort of tramp, whiling away the hours that 

 intervene between one cliff-city and another ; but he actually nests there. 

 The bird which the cow-boy heard was actually a father in futuro ; for a 

 nest lay safely hidden, beneath some fragment of a rock, a couple of stone- 

 throws away. But the cow-boy never found it: neither,— to be frank.— did any- 

 body else. Nevertheless, the cow-boy's friend, crouching from fierce mid- 

 afternoon heat in a little gulch not forty rods from the singing-rock, one June 

 day, beheld the male Rock Wren guiltily sneaking along, from rock to rock 

 with something in his beak that looked almost as big as a kangaroo, but 

 was, in very truth, just a big rocky mountain locust. 



The books tell us that the Rock Wren nests in pot-holes of the weather, 

 ed rocks; and of course the books are right. So, likewise, are the popular 

 bird articles; written, mayhap, by some ambitious public school teacher, with 

 sundry Nature-Study Books grouped about her, some fevered evening that 





