und nesting birds and watched
the ways of them. His memory brought old pictures back to him. The
crotch in the tree, where the robin had plastered her nest, modeling the
mud with her feathered breast; the brook-edge willows, where the
blackbirds built; the meadow, with its hidden homes of bobolinks; and
the woods where the whip-poor-wills called o' nights. His thoughts made
a boy of him again, and he forgot everything else in the world in his
wish to see the little birds he felt sure must be among the pebbles
before him. So he crept about carefully, here and there, and at last
came upon the children of Mis. He picked up the fluffy little balls of
down and snuggled them gently in his big hands for a moment. Then he put
them back to their safe roof, and, gathering up his tools, went on his
way, whistling a merry tune remembered from the days when he trudged
down Long-ago Lane to the pasture, for his father's cows. Late of
afternoon it used to be, while the nighthawks dashed overhead in their
air-hunts, showing the white spots in their wings that looked like
holes, and sometimes making him jump as they dropped and turned, with a
sudden "boom."

No sooner had the sound of his whistle gone from the roof, than Mother
Nomer came back to her houseless home--any spot doing as well as
another, now that the twins were hatched and able to walk about. As she
called her babies to her and tucked them under her feathers, her heart
still beating quickly with the excitement of her scare, it would be easy
to guess from the dear way of her cuddling that it isn't a beautiful
woven cradle or quaint walls of clay that matter most in the life of
young birds, but the loving care that is given them. In this respect the
young orioles, swinging in their hammock among the swaying tips of the
elm tree, and the children of Eve and Petro, in their wonderful brick
mansion, were no better off than the twins of Mis and Mother Nomer.

Busy indeed was Mis in the twilights that followed the hatching of his
children; and, though he was as much in the air as ever, it was not the
fun of frolic and clownish tricks that kept him there. For, besides his
own keen appetite, he had now the hunger of the twins to spur him on.
Such a hunter as he was in those days! Why, he caught a thousand
mosquitos on one trip; and meeting a swarm of flying ants, thought
nothing at all of gobbling up five hundred before he stopped. Countless
flies went down his throat. And when the