(Hip Uarblrr 7 



there dashed out, on foot, a superb Yellow Rail. Alternately running, 

 mouse-like, and stopping, in statuesque pose, (just as callow Soras do), he 

 gave me the rarest possible opportunity of viewing his superb colors. In the 

 main he was like a two-weeks-old chicken, in size and bearing. An apparent 

 streaking of lighter and darker chestnut-clay suffused his back ; while down 

 the side of the neck, quite broadly, ran a band of brightest chestnut, illy de- 

 fined. Thrice, for the space of two or three seconds, he posed for me ; and 



then dived, quickly, into the protecting depths of last year's grass. And, 



that was all. Search as I might, with energy of hope, with doggedness of 

 despair, no new thing came to light. My Snipes, despoiled, were silent. The 

 sun was waning; and I turned my back upon it all. Rising up the butte- 

 side, I waved farewell to the pair of Marsh Hawks whose four eggs, (three of 

 them abnormally small), I had borrowed for photographing. My Ferruginous 

 Hawk nest, from their grass basket among the roses, was only a bare stone's- 

 tossfrom my sand-rock. At the butte's top I stood long and watched, at close 

 range, an almost motionless soaring melanistic Western Red-tail, — a most, 

 odd creature, mottled all over, tail and all, quite like a Western Night Hawk. 

 Then I turned my face southward to listen, just once more, to the tinkling, 

 mellow songs of the Baird Sparrow, resounding, everywhere, along the sod- 

 den alkaline flats of the plateau. But a few hundred feet from a farm house 

 whose cellar I sought to change plates for my one discovered nest of Mc- 

 Cown Longspur, — (beneath a tiny bit of mountain sage, two feet from recent- 

 ly-sprouted wheat, at margin of a roadway), — I heard, in an upland bog 

 that crowned the plateau, the clicking of a solitary Yellow Rail. This, too, 

 was a new record ; and it was my last. An hour and a half of trudging 

 brought the duffle-laden naturalist far from the meadows into the rough 

 longspur country. The wheat-elevators of the town loom near. At margin 

 of a side-pasture a female Longspur, beckoning me with her fan, leaves her 

 newly-hatched little ones in their exquisite nest, with white horse-hair lining; 

 the whole nest most-daintily deep-set into the base of a most diminutive 

 rose-bush. Sunset drew on ; and a faint glory overspread the Antelope 

 hills, far to the southwest. It was the last. The bleating of the Snipe, the 

 tunk of the Yellow Rail, the effervescent call of the Longspur, — all these, 

 henceforward, are not of experience but of memory. I shall never go back. 



