When the industrious bird had filled her beak with material that stuck out on both sides, which I concluded to be some kind of rock moss, she started back. Not up the face of that blank wall, loaded as she was, but by a strange path that she knew well, up which I watched her wending her way to her proper level. This was a cleft between two solid bodies of rock, where, it would seem, the two walls, in settling together for their lifelong union, had broken and crumbled, and formed between them a sort of crack, filled with unattached bowlders, with crevices and passages, sometimes perpendicular, sometimes horizontal. Around and through these was a zigzag road to the top, evidently as familiar to that atom of a bird as Broadway is to some of her fellow-creatures, and more easily traversed, for she had it all to herself. The wren flew about three feet to the first step of her upward passage, then ran and clambered nearly all the rest of the way, darting behind jutting rocks and coming out the other side, occasionally flying a foot or two; now pausing as if for an observation, jerking her tail upright and letting it drop back, wren-fashion, then starting afresh, and so going on till she reached the level of her nest, when she flew across the (apparent) forty or fifty feet, directly into the crevice. In a minute she came out, and without an instant's pause flung herself down again. I watched this curious process very closely. The wren seemed to close her wings; certainly she did not use them, nor were they in the least spread that I could detect. She came to the ground as if she were a stone, as quickly and as directly as a stone would have fallen; but just before touching the ground she spread her wings, and alighted lightly on her feet. Then she fell to her labor of collecting what I suppose was nesting material, and in a few minutes started up again by the roundabout road to the top. Two hours or more, with gradually stiffening neck, I spent with the wren, while she worked constantly and silently, and not once during all that time did the singer appear. What the scattering parties of tourists, who from time to time passed me, thought of a silent personage sitting in the cañon alone, staring intently up at a blank wall of rock, I did not inquire. Perhaps that she was a verse-writer seeking inspiration; more likely, however, a harmless lunatic musing over her own fancies.