WITH BROWN PREDOMINATING 267 



silence for one moment that I might hear the wonderful 

 song! The twitter of the young was clearly audible 

 from where I sat, twenty feet away, and the melody of 

 the father bird's rhapsody rang clearly over the noise 

 of the rapids, but there must have been half tones lost 

 in the tumult that were even sweeter than the notes 

 that reached my ears. His song ended, into the water 

 he plunged where the current was swiftest and where a 

 strong man could not venture and live. Yet the bird 

 flew upstream against it as easily as if in the air 

 alone. 



In feeding the young, both adults hovered just below 

 the entrance to the nest, as a humming-bird beneath a 

 flower, darting up with a little bound to deliver the 

 food. The queer-looking larvse were evidently picked 

 up on the bottom of the river, but did not, I am sure, 

 belong to any species of mosquito, for each was an inch 

 and a half long and seemed to have many legs, like 

 a scorpion. These constituted fully half of the food 

 brought, and the rest was too small to be accurately 

 identified. One or the other of the adults came to the 

 nest as often as every ten minutes during the week that 

 I watched them, and at times the intervals were much 

 shorter. They invariably approached the nest in the 

 same way, alighting first on a smaller rock whose top 

 just broke the surface into foam, dipping and winking 

 awhile on it, and hopping to the projecting splinter on 

 the trunk, whence, after more dipping and winking, they 

 fluttered over to the nest. The little Ouzels never ap- 

 peared in the doorway until the parent had come to the 



