before. And the
female, too, how she cackled and darted about! How busy they both were!
Rushing into the nest, they hustled those eggs out in less than a
minute, wren time. They carried in new material, and by the third day
were fairly installed again in their old quarters; but on the third day,
so rapidly are these little dramas played, the female bluebird
reappeared with another mate. Ah! how the wren stock went down then!
What dismay and despair filled again those little breasts! It was
pitiful. They did not scold as before, but after a day or two withdrew
from the garden, dumb with grief, and gave up the struggle.

* * * * *

The chatter of a second brood of nearly fledged wrens is heard now
(August 20) in an oriole's nest suspended from the branch of an
apple-tree near where I write. Earlier in the season the parent birds
made long and determined attempts to establish themselves in a cavity
that had been occupied by a pair of bluebirds. The original proprietor
of the place was the downy woodpecker. He had excavated it the autumn
before, and had passed the winter there, often to my certain knowledge
lying abed till nine o'clock in the morning. In the spring he went
elsewhere, probably with a female, to begin the season in new quarters.
The bluebirds early took possession, and in June their first brood had
flown. The wrens had been hanging around, evidently with an eye on the
place (such little comedies may be witnessed anywhere), and now very
naturally thought it was their turn. A day or two after the young
bluebirds had flown, I noticed some fine, dry grass clinging to the
entrance to the cavity; a circumstance which I understood a few moments
later, when the wren rushed by me into the cover of a small Norway
spruce, hotly pursued by the male bluebird. It was a brown streak and a
blue streak pretty close together. The wrens had gone to housecleaning,
and the bluebird had returned to find his bed and bedding being pitched
out of doors, and had thereupon given the wrens to understand in the
most emphatic manner that he had no intention of vacating the premises
so early in the season. Day after day, for more than two weeks, the male
bluebird had to clear his premises of these intruders. It occupied much
of his time and not a little of mine, as I sat with a book in a
summer-house near by, laughing at his pretty fury and spiteful onset. On
two occasions the wren rushed under the chair in