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There he sat, and tried to forget Marie in the tinkling of the streams, and the sighing of the autumn leaves, and the cooing of the sleepy doves; while the ice-bird, as the Germans call the water-ouzel, sat on a rock in the river below, and warbled his low sweet song, and then flitted up the grassy reach to perch and sing again on the next rock above.
And oh, the glory of the sun after these long dark days! The sky was a deep, serene, perfect blue. The snow shone and glittered and sparkled everywhere. Down in the gorge she saw a little bird in quick flight. It skimmed the water; it Lighted on a rock in the spray; it put back its head and seemed to be bursting with a joy of song. A water-ouzel!
He will see ravens and hawks about the crags, and about the river half covered in summer with floating pond-weed, watercress, and the broad leaves of the yellow lily, he will notice many a water-ouzel bobbing with white breast, water-hens gliding from bank to bank, merry bands of divers, and the brilliant blue gleam of the passing kingfisher, which here is allowed to fish in peace, like the otter.
The halcyon or kingfisher, the white-breasted water-ouzel, the skylark, the "ruddock" or robin-redbreast, the wren, the green plover, the woodcock these serve for some of his moods; but he mentions eagle, kite, hawk, buzzard, owl, falcon, cormorant, and a number of others, always with discretion and with the full measure of knowledge vouchsafed to his time.
First and best of all is the water-ouzel, a dainty, dusky little bird about the size of a robin, that sings in sweet fluty song all winter and all summer, in storms and calms, sunshine and shadow, haunting the rapids and waterfalls with marvelous constancy, building his nest in the cleft of a rock bathed in spray.
And always as he went, panting up and ploughing down, the steep slopes, his eyes were keen for meat, be it Douglas squirrel or bear. But the woods seemed deserted and empty; only those cheerful, impudent little bundles of feathers, the snowbirds, and an occasional, darting water-ouzel along the creeks.
Serious-eyed, alert, resolute, he could be depended on to carry out any purpose he had determined on; it was his firm hands that would hold Clarence's scourge. Millicent was sitting in a window-seat with a paint-box beside her and a drawing of a water-ouzel upon her knee. It was a lifelike sketch, but she had a great capacity for painstaking and she was not altogether pleased with the drawing.
On the other hand, the acutest observer by examining the dead body of the water-ouzel would never have suspected its sub-aquatic habits; yet this anomalous member of the strictly terrestrial thrush family wholly subsists by diving, grasping the stones with its feet and using its wings under water.
She would walk up the creek back of the house, sit by the hour near the pool where the water came slithering down over a green and grey boulder, watching for the water-ouzel, entertained in an absent sort of way by his bobbings and flirtings and snatches of song. She dreamed day-dreams; she started expectantly every time a chipmunk made a scurrying racket in dead leaves.
"I think it's correct," returned Millicent; "but I'm not sure it's what it ought to be in other respects. You see, its purpose is to show people what a water-ouzel is like and it's hard to make the creature out. Of course, I could have drawn it against a background that would have forced up every line, but that wouldn't have been right these wild things were made to fade into their surroundings."
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