After resting awhile, I strolled up the valley to listen to the vesper concert of the birds, and a rich one it was. The western robins were piping their blithesome "Cheerilies," Audubon's warblers were trilling in the pines, and, most of all--but here I had one of the most gratifying finds in all my mountain quest. It will perhaps be remembered that the white-crowned sparrows, so plentiful in the upper valley, were not to be seen in the valley of Moraine Lake. Still there were compensations in this cloistered dip among the towering mountains; the mountain hermit thrushes--sometimes called Audubon's thrushes--found the sequestered valley precisely to their liking, and on the evening in question I saw them and heard their pensive cadences for the first time. Such exquisite tones, which seemed to take vocal possession of the vale and the steep, pine-clad mountain side, it has seldom been my good fortune to hear. Scores of the birds were singing simultaneously, some of their voices pitched high in the scale and others quite low, as though they were furnishing both the air and the contralto of the chorus. It was my first opportunity to listen to the songs of any of the several varieties of hermit thrushes, and I freely confess that I came, a willing captive, under the spell of their minstrelsy, so sweet and sad and far away, and yet so rich in vocal expression. In the latter part of the run, which is all too brief, there is a strain which bears close resemblance to the liquid melody of the eastern wood-thrush, but the opening notes have a pathetic quality all their own. Perhaps Charles G. D. Roberts can give some idea of one's feelings at a time like this: "O hermit of evening! thine hour Is the sacrament of desire, When love hath a heavenlier flower, And passion a holier fire." A happy moment it was when a nest of this mountain hermit was discovered, saddled on one of the lower limbs of a pine and containing four eggs of a rich green color. These birds are partial to dense pine forests on the steep, rocky mountain sides. They are extremely shy and elusive, evidently believing that hermit thrushes ought to be heard and not seen. A score or more may be singing at a stone's throw up an acclivity, but if you clamber toward them they will simply remove further up the mountain, making your effort to see and hear them at close range unavailing. That evening, however, as the gloaming settled upon the valley, one selected a perch on a dead branch some distance up the hillside, and obligingly permitted me to obtain a fair view of him with my glass. The hermits breed far up in the mountains, the greatest altitude at which I found them being on the sides of Bald Mountain, above Seven Lakes and a little below the timber-line. To this day their sad refrains are ringing in my ears, bringing back the thought of many half-mournful facts and incidents that haunt the memory.