nel as I came stalking near it.
She flew over the brow of the hill in her smooth, silent way, and
uttered no syllable of protest as I examined her domicile--or, rather,
the outside of it. Scattered about the dark doorway were a number of
bones, feathers, and the skin of a frog, telling the story of the _table
d'hote_ set by this underground dweller before her nestlings. She might
have put up the crossbones and skull as a sign at the entrance to her
burrow, or even placed there the well-known Dantean legend, "All hope
abandon, ye who enter here," neither of which would have been more
suggestive than the telltale litter piled up before her door. When I
chased her from her hiding-place, she flew down the hill and alighted on
a fence-post in the neighborhood of her nest, uttering several screechy
notes as I came near her again, as if she meant to say that I was
carrying the joke a little too far in pursuing her about. Presently she
circled away on oily wings, and I saw her no more.

[Illustration: "_The dark doorway_"]

So little enthusiasm does such a bird stir within me that I felt too
lazy to follow her about on the arid plain. It may be interesting as a
matter of scientific information to know that the burrowing owl breeds
in a hole in the ground, and keeps company with the prairie dog and the
rattlesnake, but a bird that lives in a gloomy, malodorous cave, whose
manners are far from attractive, and whose voice sounds as strident as a
buzz-saw--surely such a bird can cast no spell upon the observer who is
interested in the aesthetic side of bird nature. A recent writer, in
describing "A Buzzards' Banquet," asks a couple of pregnant questions:
"Is there anything ugly out of doors? Can the ardent, sympathetic lover
of nature ever find her unlovely?" To the present writer these questions
present no Chinese puzzle. He simply brushes all speculation and
theorizing aside by responding "Yes," to both interrogatories, on the
principle that it is sometimes just as well to cut the Gordian knot as
to waste precious time trying to untie it. The burrowing owl makes me
think of a denizen of the other side of the river Styx, and why should
one try to love that which nature has made unattractive, especially when
one cannot help one's feeling?

In the preceding chronicles no mention, I believe, has been made of one
little bird that deserves more than a mere _obiter dictum_. My first
meeting with the blithesome house-finch of the West