lizing creature of
descending to the level of mortals, and the brook. Suddenly, while I
looked, she flung herself off her perch, and fell--down--down--down--
disappearing at last behind a clump of weeds at the bottom. Was she
killed? Had she been shot by some noiseless air-gun? What had become
of the tiny wren? I sprang to my feet, and hurried as near as the
intervening stream would allow, when lo! there she was, lively and fussy
as ever, running about at the foot of the cliff, searching, searching
all the time, ever and anon jumping up and pulling from the rock
something that clung to it.

When the industrious bird had filled her beak with material that stuck
out on both sides, which I concluded to be some kind of rock moss, she
started back. Not up the face of that blank wall, loaded as she was,
but by a strange path that she knew well, up which I watched her wending
her way to her proper level. This was a cleft between two solid bodies
of rock, where, it would seem, the two walls, in settling together for
their lifelong union, had broken and crumbled, and formed between them a
sort of crack, filled with unattached bowlders, with crevices and
passages, sometimes perpendicular, sometimes horizontal. Around and
through these was a zigzag road to the top, evidently as familiar to
that atom of a bird as Broadway is to some of her fellow-creatures, and
more easily traversed, for she had it all to herself.

The wren flew about three feet to the first step of her upward passage,
then ran and clambered nearly all the rest of the way, darting behind
jutting rocks and coming out the other side, occasionally flying a foot
or two; now pausing as if for an observation, jerking her tail upright
and letting it drop back, wren-fashion, then starting afresh, and so
going on till she reached the level of her nest, when she flew across
the (apparent) forty or fifty feet, directly into the crevice. In a
minute she came out, and without an instant's pause flung herself down
again.

I watched this curious process very closely. The wren seemed to close
her wings; certainly she did not use them, nor were they in the least
spread that I could detect. She came to the ground as if she were a
stone, as quickly and as directly as a stone would have fallen; but just
before touching the ground she spread her wings, and alighted lightly on
her feet. Then she fell to her labor of collecting what I suppose was
nesting material, and in a few minutes