home for the pretty dear without any one's being the wiser,
unless it were the bee-bird in the attic. A family of bush-tits flew
about in the sycamore top, looking like pin-heads in a grove of trees. A
black ph[oe]be sometimes lit on the fence posts under the branches--it
wanted to find a nesting place about the windmill in the opposite field,
I felt sure, though a boy had told me that the bird sometimes plastered
its nest onto the branches of the big tree itself. Besides all the rest,
rosy linnets and blue lazuli buntings made the old tree ring with their
musical roundelays.

One day when I rode down to the sycamore, the meadow bordering it was
full of haycocks, and a rabbit ran out from under one of them,
frightened by the clatter of Billy's hoofs. That morning the tree was
fairly alive with blackbirds and doves--what a deafening medley the
blackbirds made! In the fields near the sycamore flocks of redwings went
swinging over the tall gleaming mustard. This was a great place for
blackbirds, for the big tree was on the edge of the one piece of marsh
land in the valley, and they were quick to take advantage of its reeds
for nesting places.

The cienaga--as they called the swamp--was used as a pasture. It was
pleasant to look out upon, from under the branches of the great tree. A
group of horses stood in the shade of a cluster of oaks on the farther
side of it, while the cows, a beautiful herd of buff and white
Guernseys, waded through the swamp grass to drink near the sycamore, and
the blackbirds wound in and out among them. I had been in a dry land so
long it was hard to believe there was actual water in the marsh till I
saw it drip from their chins and heard the sucking sound as they
laboriously dragged their feet out of the mud--a noise that took me back
to eastern pastures, but sounded strangely unfamiliar here in this
rainless land. One of the pretty Guernseys with a white star in her
forehead strayed up under the tree, and the shadows of the leaves moved
over her as she raised her sensitive face to see who was there.

The son of the ranchman who owned the dairy--the one who invited me down
to see the play between his dog Romulus and the burrowing owl--said that
when herding cows by the sycamore he once caught sight of a coyote wolf.
He clapped his hands to send his dog, Romulus, after the wolf; and the
noise frightened the wild creature so that he started to run up the hill
across the road from the sycamore. Ro