At Bailey's I found my first and only white-crowned sparrow's nest for this trip, although two years before I was fortunate enough to discover several nests in the valleys creeping from the foot of Pike's Peak. At dusk one evening I was walking along the railway below the village, listening to the sweetly pensive trills of the white-crowns in the bushes bordering the creek, when there was a sharp chirp in the willows, and a female white-crown darted over to my side of the stream and slipped quietly into a thick bush on the bank. I stepped down to the spot, and the pretty madame leaped away, uncovering a well-woven nest containing four white eggs speckled with dark brown. All the while her spouse was trilling with might and main on the other side of the creek, to make believe that there was nothing serious happening, no nest that any one cared anything about. His mate could not disguise her agitation by assuming nonchalance, but flitted about in the willows and chirped pitifully. I hurried away to relieve her distress. The cottages on the slopes were gay with tourists enjoying their summer outing, and beautiful Kiowa Lodge, perched on a shoulder of the mountain among embowering pines, glowed with incandescent lights, while its blithe-hearted guests pursued their chosen kinds of pastime; but none of them, I venture to assert, were happier than the little white-crown in her grassy lodge on the bank of the murmuring stream.
On the way down the cañon, as we were going to Denver, I was able to add three belted kingfishers to my bird-roll of Colorado species, the only ones I saw in the Rockies.
Our jaunt of 1901 included a trip to Boulder and a thrilling swing around the far-famed "Switzerland Trail" to Ward, perched on the mountain sides among the clouds hard by the timber-line. Almost everywhere we met with feathered comrades; in some places, especially about Boulder, many of them; but no new species were seen, and no habits observed that have not been sufficiently delineated in other parts of this book. If one could only observe all the birds all the time in all places, what a happy life the bird-lover would live! It is with feelings of mingled joy and sadness that one cons Longfellow's melodious lines:--