The baffling carol went on
for some seconds, and for the only time in my life I wished I could put
a spell upon brook-babble, that I might the better hear.

Cautiously I raised my glass to my eyes, and examined the rocks across
the water, probably eight feet from me. Then arose again that strange
cry, and at the same instant my eye fell upon a tiny ledge, level with
the water, and perhaps six inches long, on which stood a small
fellow-creature in great excitement. He was engaged in what I should
call "curtsying"; that is, bending his leg joint, and dropping his plump
little body for a second, then bobbing up to his fullest height,
repeating the performance constantly,--looking eagerly out over the
water the while, evidently expecting somebody. This was undoubtedly the
bird's manner of begging for food,--a very pretty and well-bred way,
too, vastly superior to the impetuous calls and demands of some young
birds. The movement was "dipping," of course, and he was the dipper, or
ouzel baby, that had been cradled in that fountain-dashed nest by the
fall. He was not long out of it, either; for though fully dressed in his
modest slate-color, with white feet, and white edgings to many of his
feathers, he had hardly a vestige of a tail. He was a winsome baby, for
all that.

While I studied the points of the stranger, breathless lest he should
disappear before my eyes, he suddenly burst out with the strange call I
had heard. It was clearly a cry of joy, of welcome, for out of the
water, up on to the ledge beside him, scrambled at that moment a
grown-up ouzel. He gave one poke into the wide-open mouth of the infant,
then slipped back into the water, dropped down a foot or more, climbed
out upon another little shelf in the rock, and in a moment the song
arose. I watched the singer closely. The notes were so low and so
mingled with the roar of the brook that even then I should not have been
certain he was uttering them if I had not seen his throat and mouth
distinctly. The song was really exquisite, and as much in harmony with
the melody of the stream as the voice of the English sparrow is with the
city sounds among which he dwells, and the plaintive refrain of the
meadow-lark with the low-lying, silent fields where he spends his days.

But little cared baby ouzel for music, however ravishing. What to his
mind was far more important was food,--in short, worms. His pretty
begging continued, and the daring notion of attempting a pe