ng whether to be
afraid or not, and turning one ear trumpet and then the other. But
though smiling at him, I was a human being, there was no getting around
that; and after a few undecided hops, this way and that, he ran off and
disappeared in the brush. Near where he had been was a spot where a
number of rabbit runways came to a centre, and around it the rabbit
council had been sitting in a circle, their footprints proved.

Brown chippies were not much commoner around the ranch-house than
western house wrens were, but the big prosaic brown birds seemed much
more commonplace. The wrens were strongly individual and winning
wherever they were met. They nested in all sorts of odd nooks and
corners about the buildings. One went so far as to take up its abode in
the wire-screened refrigerator that stood outside the kitchen under an
oak! Another pair stowed their nest away in an old nosebag hanging on a
peg in the wine shed; while a third lived in one of the old grape crates
piled up in the raisin shed.

The crate nest was delightful to watch. The jolly little birds, with
tails over their backs and wings hanging, would sing and work close
beside me, only three or four feet away. They would look up at me with
their frank fearless eyes and then squeeze down through their crack into
the crate, and sit and scold inside it--such an amusing muffled little
scold! The nest was so astonishingly large I was interested to measure
it. Twigs were strewn loosely over one end of the box, covering a square
nearly sixteen inches on a side. The compact high body of the nest
measured eight by ten inches, and came so near the top of the crate that
the birds could just creep in under the slats. Some of the twigs were
ten inches long, regular broom handles in the bills of the short bobbing
wrens. One of the birds once appeared with a twig as long as itself. It
flew to the side of a beam with it, at sight of me, and stood there
balancing the stick in its bill, in pretty fashion. Another time it flew
to the peak of the shed to examine an old swallow's nest now occupied by
linnets, and amused itself throwing down its neighbors' straws--the
naughty little rogue!

Such jolly songsters! They were fairly bubbling over with happiness all
the time. They had an old stub in front of the shed that might well have
been called the singing stub, for they kept it ringing with music when
they were not running on inside the shed. They seemed to warble as
easily a