in an apple-tree or upon the fence, on
the other side of the house.

The song sparrow nearly always builds upon the ground, but my little
neighbor laid the foundations of her domicile a foot or more above the
soil. And what a mass of straws and twigs she did collect together! How
coarse and careless and aimless at first,--a mere lot of rubbish dropped
upon the tangle of dry limbs; but presently how it began to refine and
come into shape in the centre! till there was the most exquisite
hair-lined cup set about by a chaos of coarse straws and branches. What
a process of evolution! The completed nest was foreshadowed by the first
stiff straw; but how far off is yet that dainty casket with its
complement of speckled eggs! The nest was so placed that it had for
canopy a large, broad, drooping leaf of yellow dock. This formed a
perfect shield against both sun and rain, while it served to conceal it
from any curious eyes from above,--from the cat, for instance, prowling
along the top of the wall. Before the eggs had hatched, the docken leaf
wilted and dried and fell down upon the nest. But the mother bird
managed to insinuate herself beneath it, and went on with her brooding
all the same.

Then I arranged an artificial cover of leaves and branches, which
shielded her charge till they had flown away. A mere trifle was this
little bob-tailed bird with her arts and her secrets, and the male with
his song, and yet the pair gave a touch of something to those days and
to that place which I would not willingly have missed.

THE CHIMNEY SWIFT

One day a swarm of honey-bees went into my chimney, and I mounted the
stack to see into which flue they had gone. As I craned my neck above
the sooty vent, with the bees humming about my ears, the first thing my
eye rested upon in the black interior was a pair of long white pearls
upon a little shelf of twigs, the nest of the chimney swallow, or
swift,--honey, soot, and birds' eggs closely associated. The bees,
though in an unused flue, soon found the gas of anthracite that hovered
about the top of the chimney too much for them, and they left. But the
swifts are not repelled by smoke. They seem to have entirely abandoned
their former nesting-places in hollow trees and stumps, and to frequent
only chimneys. A tireless bird, never perching, all day upon the wing,
and probably capable of flying one thousand miles in twenty-four hours,
they do not even stop to gather materials for their