another race, for clearly now her heart was won.
Won, really, days ago, if only he had known. For full three days she
had come at the loud tattoo and coyly admired him from afar, and felt a
little piqued that he had not yet found out her, so close at hand. So it
was not quite all mischance, perhaps, that little stamp that caught his
ear. But now she meekly bowed her head with sweet, submissive grace--the
desert passed, the parch-burnt wanderer found the spring at last.

Oh, those were bright, glad days in the lovely glen of the unlovely
name. The sun was never so bright, and the piney air was balmier sweet
than dreams. And that great noble bird came daily on his log, sometimes
with her and sometimes quite alone, and drummed for very joy of being
alive. But why sometimes alone? Why not forever with his Brownie bride?
Why should she stay to feast and play with him for hours, then take some
stealthy chance to slip away and see him no more for hours or till next
day, when his martial music from the log announced him restless for her
quick return? There was a woodland mystery here he could not clear. Why
should her stay with him grow daily less till it was down to minutes,
and one day at last she never came at all. Nor the next, nor the next,
and Redruff, wild, careered on lightning wing and drummed on the old
log, then away up-stream on another log, and skimmed the hill to another
ravine to drum and drum. But on the fourth day, when he came and loudly
called her, as of old, at their earliest tryst, he heard a sound in the
bushes, as at first, and there was his missing Brownie bride with ten
little peeping partridges following after.

Redruff skimmed to her side, terribly frightening the bright-eyed
downlings, and was just a little dashed to find the brood with claims
far stronger than his own. But he soon accepted the change, and
thenceforth joined himself to the brood, caring for them as his father
never had for him.

VI

Good fathers are rare in the grouse world. The mother-grouse builds her
nest and hatches out her young without help. She even hides the place
of the nest from the father and meets him only at the drum-log and the
feeding-ground, or perhaps the dusting-place, which is the club-house of
the grouse kind.

When Brownie's little ones came out they had filled her every thought,
even to the forgetting of their splendid father. But on the third
day, when they were strong enough, she had taken them with her