This aesthetic manner of discharging family duties, alternating food for the body with rapture of the soul, continued for some time, probably until the young bird had as much as was good for him; and then supplies were cut off by the peremptory disappearance of the purveyor, who plunged with the brook over the edge of a rock, and was seen no more. A little later a grown bird appeared, that I supposed at first was the returning papa, but a few moments' observation convinced me that it was the mother; partly because no song accompanied the work, but more because of the entirely different manners of the new-comer. Filling the crop of that importunate offspring of hers was, with this Quaker-dressed dame, a serious business that left no time for rest or recreation. Two charmed hours I sat absorbed, watching the most wonderful evolutions one could believe possible to a creature in feathers. At the point where this little drama was enacted, the brook rushed over a line of pebbles stretching from bank to bank, lying at all angles and of all sizes, from six to ten inches in diameter. Then it ran five or six feet quietly, around smooth rocks here and there above the water, and ended by plunging over a mass of bowlders to a lower level. The bird began by mounting one of those slippery rounded stones, and thrusting her head under water up to her shoulders. Holding it there a few seconds, apparently looking for something, she then jumped in where the turmoil was maddest, picked an object from the bottom, and, returning to the ledge, gave it to baby. The next moment, before I had recovered from my astonishment at this feat of the ouzel, she ran directly up the falls (which, though not high, were exceedingly lively), being half the time entirely under water, and exactly as much at her ease as if no water were there; though how she could stand in the rapid current, not to speak of walking straight up against it, I could not understand. Often she threw herself into the stream, and let it carry her down, like a duck, a foot or two, while she looked intently on the bottom, then simply walked up out of it on to a stone. I could see that her plumage was not in the least wet; a drop or two often rested on her back when she came out, but it rolled off in a moment. She never even shook herself. The food she brought to that eager youngling every few minutes looked like minute worms, doubtless some insect larvæ.