WAYSIDE RAMBLES. 17 



Many, many a cunning bird prank would have 

 been missed had I kept, like the majority of pedes- 

 trians, to the beaten track. There, for example, 

 is that odd little genius in mottled robes, the brown 

 creeper, who has performed a sufficient number of 

 quaint gambols to repay me for all the time and 

 effort expended in pursuing my wayside rambles. 

 He is always sui generis, apparently priding himself 

 on his eccentricities, like some people you may 

 know. A genuine arboreal creeper, he almost in- 

 variably coasts up hill. Unlike his congeners, the 

 nuthatch and the creeping warbler, he never goes 

 head-downward. Dear me, no ! Whether it is 

 because it makes him light-headed, or he regards 

 it as bad form, I am unable to say. He does not 

 even hitch down backward after the manner of the 

 woodpeckers, but marches up, up, up, until he 

 thinks it time to descend, which he does by taking 

 to wing, bounding around in an arc as if he were 

 an animated rubber ball. You may almost imagine 

 him saying: "Pah! such vulgar sport as creeping 

 head-downward may be well enough for mere 

 plebeians like the nuthatches and the striped 

 creepers, but it is quite beneath the caste of a 

 patrician like myself ! Tseem ! tseem ! " At rare 

 intervals he will slip down sidewise for a short 

 distance, in a slightly oblique direction, especially 

 when he comes to a fork of the branches. 



However, he does not think it beneath his dignity 

 to take a promenade on the under side of a hori- 

 zontal bough. One day as I watched him doing 



