the inside. In shape the nests are blunt ovals, with a tiny hole
for entrance a little above the centre. Seven out of the ten nests
contained four eggs each, the rest three each. The eggs in colour are
a pale yellowish white with a tinge of green, thickly speckled with
dashes rather than spots of rusty red, tending in some to form a cap,
in others a zone round the large end. The average of twenty eggs
measured is 0.53 by 0.44 inch. The nests were all, with one exception,
supported by stems of the grass being worked into the sides. The one
exception was a nest I found in the fork of a tamarisk bush. It is not
a difficult nest to find, for when you are in the vicinity of one, one
of the birds will flit about the stems of the surrounding clumps of
grass and above you freely, opening its tiny mouth absurdly wide, but
giving forth the feeblest of feeble sounds."

Writing on the Avifauna of Mt. Abu and N. Guzerat, Colonel E.A. Butler
says:--"I found a nest in a tussock of coarse grass in the sandy bed
of a river, amongst a number of tamarisk-bushes, on the 8th July,
1875, in the neighbourhood of Deesa. It was composed of fine dry
fibrous roots and grass-stems exteriorly, and lined with silky
vegetable down. It was a long bottled-shaped structure with a small
entrance on one side. The nest, eggs, situation, locality, &c. all
agree so exactly with the descriptions quoted by Dr. Jerdon and with
Mr. Anderson's note in 'Nests and Eggs,' _Rough Draft_, that I should
have found it difficult to avoid copying these two gentlemen in
describing my own nest.

"The nest contained three hard-set eggs and one young one just
hatched."

Referring to its occurrence in the Eastern Narra District, Mr. Doig
tells us:--"This little Warbler is very common. I took the first nest
in March and again in May; they build in stunted tamarisk-bushes; the
nest is circular dome-shaped, with the entrance on one side the top,
the inside being very beautifully and softly lined with the pappus of
grass-seeds. Four is the usual number of eggs in one nest."

The Blackbird type of egg above described is by no means the commonest
one; the great mass of the eggs have the ground greyish, greenish,
or pinkish white, and they are very thickly and finely freckled and
speckled all over, but most densely about the large end, with a
slightly brownish, rarely a slightly purplish grey. Occasionally when
the markings are very dense in a cap at the large end there is a
d