antly with the cicada, but made
no headway in swallowing it, when the mother took it from him and flew
to the sidewalk, and proceeded to break and bruise it more thoroughly.
Then she again placed it in his beak, and seemed to say, "There, try it
now," and sympathized so thoroughly with his efforts that she repeated
many of his motions and contortions. But the great fly was unyielding,
and, indeed, seemed ridiculously disproportioned to the beak that held
it. The young bird fluttered and fluttered, and screamed, "I'm stuck,
I'm stuck!" till the anxious parent again seized the morsel and carried
it to an iron railing, where she came down upon it for the space of a
minute with all the force and momentum her beak could command. Then she
offered it to her young a third time, but with the same result as
before, except that this time the bird dropped it; but she reached the
ground as soon as the cicada did, and taking it in her beak flew a
little distance to a high board fence, where she sat motionless for some
moments. While pondering the problem how that fly should be broken, the
male bluebird approached her, and said very plainly, and I thought
rather curtly, "Give me that bug," but she quickly resented his
interference and flew farther away, where she sat apparently quite
discouraged when I last saw her.

* * * * *

One day in early May, Ted and I made an expedition to the Shattega, a
still, dark, deep stream that loiters silently through the woods not far
from my cabin. As we paddled along, we were on the alert for any bit of
wild life of bird or beast that might turn up.

There were so many abandoned woodpecker chambers in the small dead
trees as we went along that I determined to secure the section of a tree
containing a good one to take home and put up for the bluebirds. "Why
don't the bluebirds occupy them here?" inquired Ted. "Oh," I replied,
"bluebirds do not come so far into the woods as this. They prefer
nesting-places in the open, and near human habitations." After carefully
scrutinizing several of the trees, we at last saw one that seemed to
fill the bill. It was a small dead tree-trunk seven or eight inches in
diameter, that leaned out over the water, and from which the top had
been broken. The hole, round and firm, was ten or twelve feet above us.
After considerable effort I succeeded in breaking the stub off near the
ground, and brought it down into the boat. "Just the thing,"