have I ever seen him on the nest. On the contrary,
whilst the hen is at the nest building he is generally waiting for
her, either on the same tree or else on another close by, occasionally
uttering his well-known rich mellow note. On the 29th May I sent a boy
up a tree to examine a nest. The hen bird had been sitting for a week,
and was on the nest when the boy ascended the tree. The cock bird flew
past, and being a brilliant specimen I shot him, thinking of course
that the nest contained a full complement of eggs. To my astonishment,
however, though the hen bird sat very close, there were no eggs in the
nest, and although she returned to it once or twice afterwards, she
eventually forsook it without laying. Possibly she may have laid, and
that the eggs were destroyed by Crows. In addition to the materials
already mentioned, this nest was also composed of tow, string, and
strips of paper, all neatly woven into the exterior, and many of the
other nests mentioned were exactly similar; sometimes I have found
pieces of snake-skin woven into the exterior.

"On the 9th of July I observed a pair of Orioles building on a
neem-tree in one of the compounds in Deesa. When the nest was nearly
finished a gale of wind rose one night and scattered it all over the
bough it was fixed to. The birds at once commenced to remove it, and
in a couple of days carried off: every particle of it to another tree
about 100 yards off, upon which they built a new nest of the materials
they had removed from the other tree. I ascended the tree on the 17th
of July, and found it contained three fresh eggs.

"The eggs are pure white, sparingly spotted with moderately-sized
blackish-looking spots, if washed the spots run. They vary a good
deal in shape and size, some being very perfect ovals, others greatly
elongated, &c."

Major C.T. Bingham writes:--"The Indian Oriole builds at Allahabad and
at Delhi from the beginning of April to the end of July. In the cold
weather this bird seems to migrate more or less, as but few are seen
and none heard during that season. The nests are built generally at
the top of mango-trees and well concealed; they are constructed of
fine grass, beautifully soft, mixed with strips of plaintain-bark,
with which, or with strips of cotton cloth purloined from somewhere,
the nest is usually bound to a fork in the branch. The egg-cavity is
pretty deep, that is to say from 11/2 to 3 inches."

Mr. George Reid records the following