my study in the East and dream back
over those hours my mind is filled with memory pictures. Sauntering
through this oaken gallery, each tree recalls some pleasant hour--the
sight of a new bird, the sound of a new song, the prolonged delight of
some cozy home that I watched till accepted as a friend, when the little
family's fears and joys were my own.

That big double oak, spreading across the middle of the garden, was the
haunted tree whose blue ghost drove away the pewees and gnatcatchers
after they had begun to build; though the vireos and bush-tits braved it
out, and the tiny hummer and gentle dove were not afraid to perch there.
This was hummingbird lane--that small oak held the nest in which the two
wee nestlings sat up like Jacks-in-the-box; these blue sage bushes
growing in the sand were the ones the honey bees and hummers used to
haunt, the hummers probing each lavender lip as they circled round the
whorls; in front of this bush I saw a fairy dancer perform his airy
minuet,--swing back and forth, and then sweep up in the air to dive
whirring down with gorget puffed out and tail spread wide; and here,
when watching a procession of ants, I discovered a tiny hummingbird
building in a drooping branch that overhung the trail. That dead limb
was the perch of a wood pewee, a silent grave bird with a sad call, who
flew on when he was still only a lonely stranger. That oak top was made
memorable by the sight of a flaming oriole, though he came on a cold
foggy morning and answered my calls with a broken song and a
half-hearted scold as he sat with his feathers ruffled up about him.
Under the low spreading branches of that tree the chewinks used to
scratch--I can hear the brown leaves rustle now--the branches were so
low that, if the shy birds flew up to rest from their labors, they could
quickly drop down and disappear in the brush.

On ahead, where the garden narrows to the trail between the walls of
brush, when I was hidden behind a screen of branches, the timid
white-crowned sparrows used to venture out, hopping along quietly or
stopping to sing and pick up seeds on the path. Back a few steps was the
tree where the bush-tits came to build their second nest after the roof
of the first one fell in; the nest which hung on such a low limb that I
watched it from the sand beneath, looking up through the branches at the
blue sky, the canyon walls covered with sun-whitened bowlders, and the
turkey buzzards circling over the