required to rear its brood, which cannot be had at an
earlier date. The seed of the common thistle is apparently its mainstay.
There is no prettier sight at this season than a troop of young
goldfinches, led by their parents, going from thistle to thistle along
the roadside and pulling the ripe heads to pieces for the seed. The
plaintive call of the young is one of the characteristic August sounds.
Their nests are frequently destroyed, or the eggs thrown from them, by
the terrific July thunder-showers. Last season a pair had a nest on the
slender branch of a maple in front of the door of the house where I was
staying. The eggs were being deposited, and the happy pair had a loving
conversation about them many times each day, when one afternoon a very
violent storm arose which made the branches of the trees stream out like
wildly disheveled hair, quite turning over those on the windward side,
and emptying the pretty nest of its eggs. In such cases the birds build
anew,--a delay that may bring the incubation into August.

It is a deep, snug, compact nest, with no loose ends hanging, placed in
the fork of a small limb of an apple-tree, a peach-tree, or an
ornamental shade-tree. The eggs are faint bluish-white.

While the female is sitting, the male feeds her regularly. She calls to
him on his approach, or when she hears his voice passing by, in the most
affectionate, feminine, childlike tones, the only case I know where the
sitting bird makes any sound while in the act of incubation. When a
rival male invades the tree, or approaches too near, the male whose nest
it holds pursues and reasons or expostulates with him in the same
bright, amicable, confiding tones. Indeed, most birds make use of their
sweetest notes in war. The song of love is the song of battle too. The
male yellowbirds flit about from point to point, apparently assuring
each other of the highest sentiments of esteem and consideration, at the
same time that one intimates to the other that he is carrying his joke a
little too far. It has the effect of saying with mild and good-humored
surprise, "Why, my dear sir, this is my territory; you surely do not
mean to trespass; permit me to salute you, and to escort you over the
line." Yet the intruder does not always take the hint. Occasionally the
couple have a brief sparring-match in the air, and mount up and up, beak
to beak, to a considerable height, but rarely do they actually come to
blows.

The yellowbird bec