ve.

Then I put down my hand within a few inches of her; still she kept her
place. Should we have to lift her off bodily?

Then the young lady put down her hand, probably the prettiest and the
whitest hand the quail had ever seen. At least it started her, and off
she sprang, uncovering such a crowded nest of eggs as I had never before
beheld. Twenty-one of them! a ring or disk of white like a china
tea-saucer. You could not help saying, How pretty! How cunning! like
baby hens' eggs, as if the bird were playing at sitting, as children
play at housekeeping.

If I had known how crowded her nest was, I should not have dared disturb
her, for fear she would break some of them. But not an egg suffered harm
by her sudden flight. And no harm came to the nest afterward. Every egg
hatched, I was told, and the little chicks, hardly bigger than
bumblebees, were led away by the mother into the fields.

In about a week I paid another visit to the hawk's nest. The eggs were
all hatched, and the mother bird was hovering near. I shall never forget
the curious expression of those young hawks sitting there on the ground.
The expression was not one of youth, but of extreme age. Such an
ancient, infirm look as they had,--the sharp, dark, and shrunken look
about the face and eyes, and their feeble, tottering motions! They sat
upon their elbows and the hind part of their bodies, and their pale,
withered legs and feet extended before them in the most helpless
fashion. Their angular bodies were covered with a pale yellowish down,
like that of a chicken; their heads had a plucked, seedy appearance; and
their long, strong, naked wings hung down by their sides till they
touched the ground: power and ferocity in the first rude draught, shorn
of everything but its sinister ugliness. Another curious thing was the
gradation of the young in size; they tapered down regularly from the
first to the fifth, as if there had been, as probably there was, an
interval of a day or two between the hatchings.

The two older ones showed some signs of fear on our approach, and one of
them threw himself upon his back, and put up his impotent legs, and
glared at us with open beak. The two smaller ones regarded us not at
all. Neither of the parent birds appeared during our stay.

When I visited the nest again, eight or ten days later, the birds were
much grown, but of as marked a difference in size as before, and with
the same look of extreme old age,--old age in m