ping to see him again, but he did
not appear, and I reluctantly started down the cog-wheel track.

As I was turning a bend in the road, I caught sight of a mountain
chickadee flitting to a dead snag on the slope at the right, the next
moment slipping into a small hole leading inside. I climbed up to the
shelf, a small level nook among the tall pines on the mountain side, to
inspect her retreat, for it was the first nest of this interesting
species that I found. The chickadee flashed in and out of the orifice,
carrying food to her little ones, surreptitiously executing her
housewifely duties. The mountain tit seems to be a shy and quiet little
body when compared with the common black-cap known in the East.

While watching this bird from my place of concealment, I became
conscious of the half-suppressed chirping of a woodpecker, and, to my
intense joy, a moment later a Williamson's sapsucker swung to a pine
bole a little below me and began pecking leisurely and with assumed
nonchalance for grubs in the fissures of the bark. From my hiding-place
behind some bushes I kept my eye on the handsome creature. An artist
might well covet the privilege of painting this elegant bird as he
scales the wall of a pine tree. Presently he glided to a snag not more
than a rod from the chickadee's domicile, and then I noticed that the
dead bole was perforated by a number of woodpecker holes, into one of
which the sapsucker presently slipped with the tidbit he held in his
bill. The doorway was almost too small for him, obliging him to turn
slightly sidewise and make some effort to effect an entrance. Fortune
had treated me as one of her favorites: I had discovered the nest of
Williamson's sapsucker.

But still another surprise was in store. A low, dubious chirping was
heard, and then the female ambled leisurely to the snag and hitched up
to the orifice. She made several efforts to enter, but could not while
her spouse was within. Presently he wormed himself out, whereupon she
went in, and remained for some time. At length I crept to the snag and
beat against it with my cane. She was loath to leave the nest, but after
a little while decided that discretion was the better part of valor.
When she came out, my presence so near her nursery caused her not a
little agitation, which she displayed by flinging about from bole to
bole and uttering a nervous chirp.

As to costume, the male and the female had little in common. Her back
was picturesqu