ffered all sorts
of inducements to the fowls of the air to come and live in our suburb,
quite forgetting that humble commuters have to live there, too. Birds
have moved all the way from Wynnewood and Ambler and Chestnut Hill to
enjoy the congenial air of Marathon and the informing little pamphlets
of our club, telling them just what to eat and which houses offer the
best hospitality. All our dwellings are girt about with little villas
made of condensed milk boxes, but the feathered tyrants have grown too
pernickety to inhabit these. They come closer still, and make our homes
their own. They take the grossest liberties.

I am fond of birds, but I think the line must be drawn somewhere. The
clothes-line, for instance. The other day Titania sent me out to put up
a new clothesline; I found that a shrike or a barn swallow or some other
veery had built a nest in the clothespin basket. That means we won't be
able to hang out our laundry in the fresh Monday air and equally fresh
Monday sunshine until the nesting season is over.

Then there is a gross, fat, indiscreet robin that has taken a home in an
evergreen or mimosa or banyan tree just under our veranda railing. It is
an absurdly exposed, almost indecently exposed position, for the
confidential family business she intends to carry on. The iceman and the
butcher and the boy who brings up the Sunday ice cream from the
apothecary can't help seeing those three big blue eggs she has laid.
But, because she has nested there for the last three springs, while the
house was unoccupied, she thinks she has a perpetual lease on that
bush. She hotly resents the iceman and the butcher and the apothecary's
boy, to say nothing of me. So these worthy merchants have to trail round
a circuitous route, violating the neutral ground of a neighbor, in order
to reach the house from behind and deliver their wares through the
cellar. We none of us dare use the veranda at all for fear of
frightening her, and I have given up having the morning paper delivered
at the house because she made such shrill protest.

[Illustration]

Frightening her, do I say? Nay, it is _we_ who are frightened. I go
round to the side of the house to prune my benzine bushes or to plant a
mess of spinach and a profane starling or woodpecker bustles off her
nest with shrewish outcry and lingers nearby to rail at me. Abashed, I
stealthily scuffle back to get a spade out of the tool bin and again
that shrill scream of anger an