12 THI? ?CONDOR Vol. XIX in circumference bespoke the difficulties encountered. While the main part of the forest had been etft or burned twenty-five years before, a few of the origi- nal two-hundred-foot trees had been left standing because too knotted to make good timber, and the second growth of spruce and hemlock had now reached a height of a hundred feet. The acres adjoining the school had been cleared of bracken and timber by a carpenter who, after building the Life Saving Station on the bay, discovered the school and settled beside it, that advantages missed in his own youth might be afforded his httle daughter. In front of the house a dead tree, one of the kings of the original forest, marked the clearing from above and below, for al- though it had lost its top its shaft, estimated at two hundred feet, rose proudly into the air above the adjoining timber, while the trunk about five feet from the ground had a girth of over twenty-nine feet. Around the school house, even in vacation, the birds proved to be suggest- ively shy; but one morning a rare visitor, a Sooty Grouse, strayed into the clearing from the woods. She was first seen flying into a young spruce by' the house, and the family were called to look at her. The spruce 'was so dense and its mossy cushions made so many dark Grouse-like spots that, crane our necks as we might, we could not find her. The fisherman who had seen her fly in told us that he had once hunted half an hour trying to see a eoek hooting over his head! Discouraged by this we gave up looking, but before long I heard the fisherman calling in some excitement for "the woman "--interested in ornith- ology-to come out again. There was the Grouse, secretive inhabitant of dusky forests, out in the glaring light of day, perched on the ridgepole of the school .house surrounded by grassy acres, to us the most conspicuous,object in the landscape, though her body matched the slaty shade of the roof. The explanation was simple. Tom, the blg house eat, had flushed her from the grass, in the excitement of the chase, as the witness declared, actually jumping up into the air after her. There she sat, or rather crouched, with pointed head projecting beyond the ridgepole on one side of the roof, and long banded tail hanging over the other. The eat was still prowling about and when the excited little Goldiloeks chased him off, the old Grouse moved her head and raised up as if meditating flight, but, as if de- ciding that the child was harmless, sat down again. When the fisherman ap- proached and levelled his long spy glass at her, however, she opened her wings and flew across the school lot, disappearing in a high spruce. Where were the young? She had doubtless brought them to the open school lot to feed, as the carpenter imagined. She would have to come back and gather them together again. To get a good view of the tree into which she had flown and from which she must eo?ne, I walked over to the school house steps and sat down to wait. And still I waited. Then the two men of the house with gun and wheelbarrow followed by Goldiloeks and her two white Spitz dogs passed by and clattered down the board walk out of hearing, after which there was unbroken, reassuring silence. At last I heard a low familiar cluck- uck-uck-uck, and out came the Grouse, flying across the entire length of the school lot into the woods at its head, as if scouring the ground for her chickens. ' Where could they be? Why didn't they answer her? After a little, back she came to the woods at the foot of the lot, still without a sign, that I could note. This time, after she lit among the shadows of a high spruce branch, by close scrutiny her pointed head and dusky form could be distinguished.
