MY FIRST WATER-OUZELS 



not too far. In so important a cause I was ready 

 to sacrifice any reasonable amount of shoe-leather. 



First, although this was an accident, due to 

 insufficient, or insufficiently understood, direc- 

 tions, I tried the nearest and smallest. It was a 

 pretty place, with something of a brook ; but it 

 seemed to be much frequented by picnickers, 

 and perhaps was not secluded enough for the 

 hermit 1 1 was seeking. Be that as it might, I did 

 not find him. 



Then I tried a second and larger canon, two 

 miles or more beyond, a distance which I in- 

 creased materially by mistaking my course, stum- 

 bling into the arroyo too far down, and blundering 

 about among the boulders a long while before 

 striking the trail, so making a long and tiresome 

 day of what should have been a comparatively 

 short and easy one. And after all, though I sat 

 for some time within sight of the cascade which 

 had been my goal, I found no sign that any 

 water-ouzel had ever been there. But for a soli- 



* On further acquaintance I should hardly call the ouzel a 

 hermit, nor does he confine himself to mountain brooks. At 

 Sisson I found him more than once singing from a boat drawn 

 up on the bank of a small roadside lake ; and at Banff and in 

 the Yosemite, as well as in the Ute Pass at Manitou, I have 

 seen him perfectly at home where men on foot and in car- 

 riages were continually passing close by him, or over his head. 

 There are few birds, indeed, that seem less put out by human 

 propinquity. 



lOI 



