536 Letters, Extracts from Correspondence, Notices, ^c. 



part, my enthusiasm runs so high, that sometimes as I stand 

 alone in the wilderness, thousands of miles from home and 

 friends, hot, tired, dirty, breathless with pursuit, but holding in 

 ray hand and gloating over some new or rare bird, I feel a sort 

 of charitable pity for the rest of the poor world, who are not 

 ornithologists, and have not the chance of pursuing the science 

 in Arizona, The most disagreeable part of my life here is the 

 the mails, or rather the want of them. How completely isolated 

 I am can be imagined from the fact that I have received letters 

 from London, Paris, Washington, and Santa Fe at the same 

 time, and all written the same day ! It takes as long for one's 

 letters to come the last few hundred miles as the same number 

 of thousand miles through regions where steam laughs at geo- 

 graphical distances. " Mail," in the abstract, is the same the 

 world over, I suppose : in the concrete, however, it varies with 

 circumstances. Here it means a couple of men, with as many 

 donkeys, carrying the precious little packets on one side of huge 

 leathern panniers, and bacon and beans on the other. Civilized 

 mails come to grief sometimes by running off the track ; our 

 mails in a different way. Thus the last one, due a week ago, 

 came in yesterday in a fragmentary condition. A hundred 

 Apaches had attacked it in a canon about twenty miles from 

 here, killed one of the men, wounded the other badly, and 

 stampeded the donkeys. We sent out a strong party, and they 

 gathered up the fragments ; nor were they the traditional 

 " twelve basketsful," — hardly twelve handfuls. If there were any 

 letters for me among the lot, they are now out there among the 

 Artemisia-hvishes, to be stared at by the Lepus callotis, Wagl., 

 and perhaps twisted into the nests of Poospiza belli, Cab., or 

 Oreoscoptes montanus, Baird. So they will serve one sort of 

 ornithological purpose after all ! * * * Eead Woodhouse's 

 account of " Inscription Rock." It is a grand mass of Old Red 

 Sandstone. I clambered to its top, like Woodhouse, without 

 my gun ; and there in airy circles round my head dashed the 

 birds he called Acanthylis saxatilis. They are, without doubt, 

 the species named by Prof. Baird Panyptila melanoleuca ; for I 

 saw many, then and subsequently, and often within a few feet of 

 my head. They breed on the face of the high perpendicular 



