ater I found their
secret--down inside an old charred stump up the canyon. Occasionally I
got sight of gay liveries in the green sycamore tops. A Louisiana
tanager in his coat of many colors stopped one day, and another time,
when looking up for dull green vireos, my eye was startled by a flaming
golden oriole. The color was a keen pleasure. Lazuli buntings, relatives
of our eastern indigo-bird, sang so much within hearing that I felt sure
they were nesting in the weeds outside the line of sycamores--I did find
a pair building in the malvas beyond; a pair of bush-tits, cousins of
the chickadees, came with one of their big families; California towhees
often appeared sitting quietly on the branches; linnets were always
stopping to discuss something in their emphatic way; clamorous blue jays
rushed in and set the small birds in a panic, but seeing me quickly took
themselves off; and a pair of wary woodpeckers hunted over the sycamore
trunks and worked so cautiously that they had finished excavating a nest
only just out of my sight on the other side of the wren tree trunk
before I seriously suspected them of domestic intentions.

One day, when watching at the tree, a great brown and black lizard that
the children of the valley call the 'Jerusalem overtaker' came worming
down the side of an oak that I often leaned against. The rough bark
seemed such a help to it that I imagined the wrens had done wisely in
choosing a smooth sycamore to build in. I looked narrowly at their nest
hole with the thought in mind and saw that the birds had another point
of vantage in the way the trunk bulged at the hole--it did not seem as
if a large lizard could work itself up the smooth slippery rounding
surface, however much given to eggs for breakfast. But in the West
Indies lizards walk freely up and down the marble slabs, so it is
dangerous to say what they cannot do.

Billy had a surprise one day greater than mine over the lizard. He was
grazing quietly near where I sat under the wren tree, when he suddenly
threw up his head. His ears pointed forward, his eyes grew excited, and
as he gazed his head rose higher and higher. I jumped from the ground
and put my hand on the pommel ready to spring into the saddle. As I did
so, across the field I caught a glimpse of a great fawn-colored animal
with a white tip to its tail, bounding through the brush--a deer! Then I
heard voices through the trees and saw the red shawl of a woman in a
wagon rumbling