Occasionally I have seen from my study-window red-headed linnets
bathing in dew when water elsewhere was scarce. A large Monterey
cypress with broad branches and innumerable leaves on which the dew
lodges in still nights made favorite bathing-places. Alighting
gently, as if afraid to waste the dew, they would pause and fidget as
they do before beginning to plash in pools, then dip and scatter the
drops in showers and get as thorough a bath as they would in a pool. I
have also seen the same kind of baths taken by birds on the boughs of
silver firs on the edge of a glacier meadow, but nowhere have I seen
the dewdrops so abundant as on the Monterey cypress; and the picture
made by the quivering wings and irised dew was memorably beautiful.
Children, too, make fine pictures plashing and crowing in their little
tubs. How widely different from wallowing pigs, bathing with great
show of comfort and rubbing themselves dry against rough-barked trees!
Some of our own species seem fairly to dread the touch of water. When
the necessity of absolute cleanliness by means of frequent baths was
being preached by a friend who had been reading Combe's Physiology, in
which he had learned something of the wonders of the skin with its
millions of pores that had to be kept open for health, one of our
neighbors remarked: "Oh! that's unnatural.
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