A little over half a day was spent in walking down from Moraine Lake to the Halfway House. It was a saunter that shall never be forgotten, for I gathered a half day's tribute of lore from the birds. A narrow green hollow, wedging itself into one of the gorges of the towering Peak, and watered by a snow-fed mountain brook, proved a very paradise for birds. Here was that queer little midget of the Rockies, the broad-tailed humming-bird, which performs such wonderful feats of balancing in the air; the red-shafted flicker; the western robin, singing precisely like his eastern half-brother; a pair of house-wrens guarding their treasures; Lincoln's sparrows, not quite so shy as those at Moraine Lake; mountain chickadees; olive-sided flycatchers; on the pine-clad mountain sides the lyrical hermit thrushes; and finally those ballad-singers of the mountain vales, the white-crowned sparrows, one of whose nests I was so fortunate as to come upon. It was placed in a small pine bush, and was just in process of construction. One of the birds flew fiercely at a mischievous chipmunk, and drove him away, as if he knew him for an arrant nest-robber. Leaving this enchanting spot, I trudged down the mountain valleys and ravines, holding silent converse everywhere with the birds, and at length reached a small park, green and bushy, a short distance above the Halfway House. While jogging along, my eye caught sight of a gray-headed junco, which flitted from a clump of bushes bordering the stream to a spot on the ground close to some shrubs. The act appeared so suggestive that I decided to reconnoitre. I walked cautiously to the spot where the bird had dropped down, and in a moment she flew up with a scolding chipper. There was the nest, set on the ground in the grass and cosily hidden beneath the over-arching branches of a low bush. Had the mother bird been wise and courageous enough to retain her place, her secret would not have been betrayed, the nest was so well concealed. The pretty couch contained four juvenile juncos covered only with down, and yet, in spite of their extreme youth, their foreheads and lores showed black, and their backs a distinctly reddish tint, so early in life were they adopting the pattern worn by their parents. The persistency of species in the floral and faunal realms presents some hard nuts for the evolutionist to crack. But that is an excursus, and would lead us too far afield. This was the first junco's nest I had ever found, and no one can blame me for feeling gratified with the discovery. The gray-headed juncos were very abundant in the Rockies, and are the only species at present known to breed in the State of Colorado. They are differentiated from the common slate-colored snowbird by their ash-gray suits, modestly decorated with a rust-colored patch on the back.