72 THE CONDOR Vol. XXI am back in my old haunts again, but I have left my heart, or a large part of it, in southern California. I could not bear to come away ! I shall never be satis- fied till I go back, and I want to stay. I don't know exactly what was the overpowering fascination for me, but it was there .... There is a most delight- ful place, full of Phainopeplas and other birds, in Pasadena, The Arroya; I got a family on The Arroya Drive to take me to board, a carpenter's family, and I had a simply glorious time there." A previous letter written twenty-four hours after her arrival in Pasadena tells its enthusiastic story. "My dear, he was the first bird to greet me! He came onto a beautiful pepper tree in front of my window and called a husky sort of imitation of the red-wings' 'o-ka-lee.' I. was delighted of course, and I have spent this morning watching a pair .... Of course I am talking about the Phainopepla, the only bird for me just now. The place is in Pasadena, but has. plenty of ground and overlooks a valley where birds abound. There's a beautiful chain or-mountains across the back. It ?s simply glorious! And I am as wild over the flowers as over the birds. reached here yesterday and I have stayed in the house only long enough to eat and sleep .... I hope you are used to rhapsodies .... I got too full and had to write to one who knows." Some years after the death of her husband, Mr. Watts Todd Miller, a New Yorker like herself, and the marriage of. her oldest son and daughter, the day finally came when her hopes and longings were realized and she was ?ble to go back to California to live; and it ?vas on the bank.of that same Ar- roya "full of P?ainopeplas and other birds" that her daughter, Mary Mann Miller, also a lover of birds, built the cottage suggestively called E1 Nido, half hidden by its vines and trees and flowers, which was to shelter her for the rest of her life. By this time, Mrs. Miller had. already far exceeded the allotted span of three-score-years-and-ten, but two more bird books, The Bird our Brother, and The Children's Book of Birds, and some half dozen of her delightful juvenile books, written now from both the mother's and grandmother's points of view, came from the ever-ready pen of the indefatigable worker; making in all twent- ty-four books and a bird booklet, published mainly by the Houghton Mifflin Company and E. P. Dutton, in addition to about seven hundred and eighty ar- ticles published in various papers and magazines. One of her earlier books, The Woman's Club, was written when she was devoting much of her winter time to club work in Brooklyn and New York,
and shows the same earnest purpose that underlay all her work; for she felt
that to women denied college training the woman's club afforded not only a means of intellectual development but a help to a broader, wiser living. In her bird work, in the same way, she was inspired by a reverent belief in the uplift- ing, ennobling influence of nature. When from failing eyesight she was forced to give up her work, her keen- ly active mind was fed from books read aloud in the family circle--always one of her greatest pleasures--and she still had the joy of being in her beloved land of sunshine and flowers, or as she most often referred to it in her letters, "the Land of Heart's Desire". Even then, in one of her last letters, there was a touch of the old enthusiasm for birds, for in the summer a Screech Owl, as she wrote "an innocent little Screech Owl who doesn't screech but utters a gentle call which I love to hear," took up his residence in the eucalyptus trees near E1 Nido. "Ah, if only I had eyes to watch him! I never had such a
