The Verdin 
THE DESERT is the final testing ground of character. To despise 
its austere beauties, to wince before its hardships, to shudder at its soli¬ 
tudes, is to mark one’s self ignoble. And there are ignoble souls, else 
would the desert be over-populated. 
Aye, it is a cruel place, the desert! Cruel, that is, to the body. It 
denies food to the hungry stomach, and withholds water from the parched 
lips. The hot sands burn the toiling feet, and there is no living thing 
which the hand may touch without being pricked or stung or lacerated or 
enmeshed. If one would shout there is no man to hear, and if one would 
run there is no whither. A cruel, cruel place is the desert, the abode of 
all discomfort. But who wants to be comfortable? Not the noble soul; 
for to be comfortable is to be oblivious, to be unaware of livingness, to 
be in so far forth unalive. No one can be exactly comfortable in the 
desert; so when he is goaded and scorched and stung into a sufficient alert¬ 
ness, the noble soul knows that he is alive, and, living, he rejoices. Rejoic¬ 
ing, he rejoices with all that is alive, and chiefly with the living things of 
the desert. 
And so we love (only the noble have read thus far),—we love the 
bristling cholla cactus, which in its eagerness to impart its delicious 
pain seems to fairly leap at the passerby. We love, too, the giant cactus, 
the majestic sahuaro, defending its soft flesh with shiny rows of enduring 
spines. We love the thorny mesquite, and the zizyphus, “all thorns,” 
which hides the hardy Thrasher in its depths. And we love, oh, how we 
love the bland cat’s claw, which welcomes mildly but will not let the 
guest depart. We love the green-barked Parkinsonia, “palo verde,” 
which being denied, ever and anon, by a merciless sun, the use of leaves, 
breathes pluckily through its skin instead, and which when the sky relents 
a little, flings back unresentful gratias of splendid golden blossoms. Oh, 
Ave loA^e them all, but most of all A\ r e love the tiny fearless Gnatcatcher 
and the tiny golden Verdins, the Verdins who cruise about in this parched 
sea of terrors with never a luffing sail. Surely here is intrepid nobility, 
or else magic, outright, that a golden-visaged atom should bra\^e these 
myriad frowns of nature and pronounce them good, should move happily 
from thorn to thorn and stop ever and anon to proclaim his boundless 
satisfaction. It was in the desert that Samson found honey in a lion’s 
carcass, and it is in such another desert that Samson’s little brother 
passes a honeyed existence. 
The Verdin is without doubt the least restricted in its local ranging 
of all the desert birds. It is at home alike in the depths of the mesquite 
forest or in the monotonous mazes of atriplex, which border the shores 
of the Salton sea, alike in the unending leagues of creosote, or in the \mried 
flora of the “washes,” such as srveep down from the Chocolate Moun- 
