The last of my nesting-trips was on July 7th. The Artist in some mysterious way had learned the secret of Tern Island, one of the few places on the New Jersey coast where the Wilson tern still nests. In a rickety old power-boat--probably it was the first one ever built--we traveled haltingly through the most intricate channels imaginable, and finally reached an island hidden by shoals and salt-marshes, but whose farther beach faced the ocean. There, in a space about four hundred by one hundred feet, we found seventy nests of tern, containing a hundred and sixty-five eggs. Most of the nests contained two eggs, some three, and one, four. The nests were merely hollows in the sand, lined with bits of pure-white shell. The usual color of the eggs was a blue-green background, heavily blotched with chocolate blotches, although I found one egg of a light green, speckled all over with light-red specks. In only one nest was there a young bird. The little chick lay flat in the burning sun, while overhead hung the mother tern, pearl-white with black-tipped wings, making a grinding, scolding note. The young tern was downy like a duckling, and had tiny red feet and a pink beak tipped with black. We put up a stake to mark the nest, and later in the day, when we came back to photograph it, we found that the little tern had crawled out, followed the shadow which the stick had made, and lay with its head in the scanty shade far away from the nest. We met other rare water-fowl that blazing day. We saw the rare piping plover, whose nest I was afterwards to find in Upper Canada, black skimmers, with their strange slant-cut beaks, black tern, least tern, loons, black-bellied plover, and everywhere throughout the salt-meadows enormous great-blue herons. This was the last trip of our quartette for the summer, and we are looking forward to many more springs and summers among the bird-folk. Let me end as I began--go bird's-nesting. Escape into the open from these narrow in-door days, and learn the way to where the wild-folk dwell. Seek their paterans and share their secrets. In their land you will find the help of the hills, and hope wide as the world, and strength and youth and health and happiness in full measure. Try it. VIII THE TREASURE-HUNT