Feet and Legs plone 
the brim, now wading in a short distance, then leaping 
to a soft rim of clay, everywhere finding the most delicious 
morsels abundant. <A strange fascination took hold of the 
tree-haunting warbler, and although perhaps you and 
I would have said he was a very silly bird and that such 
a thing as a warbler turning into a sandpiper was utterly 
absurd, yet the little fellow and his descendants persisted. 
Sandpipers and sandpipers only they wished to be, and 
Nature has given them their wish. 
Study the Water Thrushes of to-day. Their whole 
life is spent along some stream or pond, searching for 
worms and snails in true sandpiper fashion. Not only 
this, but even the dipping gait of the pipers has been 
copied, and though we cannot give a reason for this char- 
acteristic, yet the warblers have learned it by heart, 
and many an amateur bird-lover do they confuse! But 
the heart of the old clan instinct can never be entirely 
eliminated, and even if a warbler should attempt to hum 
away his life on the wing like a hummingbird, or to run 
with the speed of the wind through dry deserts like an 
ostrich, yet, like the Water Thrushes, he would occasion- 
ally drift back to the old tree-tops and there sing of the 
happiness which is within his heart. 
A strange whim of evolution in one member of the 
warbler tribe results in his mimicking the sandpiper as far as 
terrestrial locomotion, a walking gait, and the peculiar tilt- 
ing habit go, but the fondness for water did not accompany 
these changes, and so we find the Oven-bird content with 
the deep woods where he builds his home upon the ground. 
He often returns for a time to the trees, but, like a college 
