The California Gall 
is partly due to destruction by rivals. It is easy to filch one egg out of a 
nest while the owner’s back is turned; and from the fierce squabbling 
which goes on every time there is a re-settlement of the winged hosts, I am 
led to fear that every exposed egg has to be defended by its rightful owner 
if it is to survive. 
As I reviewed the matter later (seated in a pine grove at Mammoth— 
the first moment of notarial leisure allowed in that strenuous season) a 
i 
-S 
33 E== 
1 
Taken in Mono County Photo by the Author 
ALARM AT NEGIT 
gentle melancholy took possession of me—a regret that all this intensity 
of living could not have been better seized upon—this furious kaleidoscope 
of life caught red-handed and transmitted dripping to the page. Perhaps 
the camera will do that—or what is the camera? A mere mechanism whose 
record also requires to be interpreted, to be sympathetically considered, 
in other words, to be lived. And there was life at an intense node—a 
thousand irate fathers beating the air with futile wing, and venting their 
rage in incomprehensible cackles and kawks, while a thousand anxious 
mothers hovered or settled by turns, their hearts wrung by the impor¬ 
tunities of a thousand chicks in very moment of entering this bubbling 
1410 
