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 216 THE CONDOR Vol. XVIII made glad the waste places, fairly excited us by their triumphant notes of color; low cactus trees held the eye as landscape centers, and great walls, twice our height, yellow with bloom, fairly radiated sunlight. Cactus Camp we dubbed our night's camp for it was beside an eight to ten acre patch of solid yellow flowered prickly pear. In one cactus bush, oddly enough, a wood rat was sitting, in an old Thrash- er's nest that he had fixed over for hi'mself. Another wood rat had decorated its house with one of Mr. Bailey's small traps, a rare specimen for its museum ! On one side of'camp was a small slough that would have been tempting for a swim had it not been for the alligator slides on its banks. The soft mud of the roads here was marked up with tracks of turtle, deer, and armadillo, and the ground in many places covered with miniature toads. From the cactus strip we drove down through coast marshes, really river flats extending along both sides of the Rio Grande, where numerous small Am- modramuses kept flying up from the marsh grass, buzzing low over the tufts to drop down again out of sight. After our long journey through country whose occasional houses were Mexican hackells, when approaching Brownsville we looked twice at an un- familiar appearing building and then exclaimed, "Why, that house has boards on it !" so quickly had our eyes accepted Mexican standards. Fresh from the prairie with eyes trained to enjoy soft colors we came to a Mexican house whose dull pink wall harmonized well with its grape vine trellis, and the adjoin- ing pink-walled chapel with its cross standing on the ground beside it. As we drove by a pretty little Sefiorita ran out and pointing to the road with a volley of Spanish held up three fingers. When we failed to comprehend, she grew embarrassed and ran back to the house full of shy' laughter, but a guess that she was sent to collect the toll gate fare finally saved the situation. As we entered Brownsville, May 1, after a hundred and eighty miles of level prairie, the jocose old Texan called out, "I can't see the town for these yere plegged houses !" Mexican hackells and palmetto roofed sheds and brush corrals were found in the heart of the town, but a public school building with piazzas running around two stories, told of the white population. A boy with a sling shot shooting Eave Swallows from a large colony nesting about a building had a modern air, and girls in shirt waists on bicycles offset Sefioritas with blue or black rebozas over their heads. The principal industry of the town was apparently Mexican drawn work, though the manes and tails of the horses had been cut off by the makers of Mexican hair work! A small pink frame house with pink pillars was pointed out as the birth- place of the Mexican Republic, for here in his early days Porfirio Diaz had lived and planned the Mexican revolution. A larger house next door with white pillars and an air of prosperity was pointed out as the second home of the man with the iron hand. In Brownsville, be it noted, no English Sparrows were seen. A number of native birds werefound, among them the Buzzard, the Mexican Crested Fly- catcher, Jackdaws, Martins, Barn and Eave Swallows, Mockingbirds and Titmice. From Brownsville we ferried across the Rio Grande to Matamoras, the river, which was rising rapidly, swirling around cutting its banks at such a rate that it was plain to see how it had cut its way down from Rio Coloral. On both sides of the river the chief crops were then cotton, corn, and sugar cane, but oranges, lemons, bananas, and guavas were also seen growing. Both