me she behaved
like a wise bird and came back for some of the material of the
abandoned nest. She had attached a single piece of twine to the
oak branch, and this she could not leave behind; twine was too
useful and too hard to get. So I saw her tugging at this string
till she loosened it, then flew toward the elm with it trailing
in the air behind her. I could but smile at her thrift. The
second nest she completed and occupied and doubtless found her
pendent-nest instinct fully satisfied by the high swaying elm
branch.

One of our prettiest nest-builders is the junco or snowbird; in
fact, it builds the prettiest nest to be found upon the ground,
I think--more massive and finely moulded and finished than that
of the song sparrow. I find it only in the Catskills, or on
their borders, often in a mossy bank by the roadside, in the woods,
or on their threshold. With what delicate and consummate art it
is insinuated into the wild scene, like some shy thing that grew
there, visible, yet hidden by its perfect fitness and harmony with
its surroundings. The mother bird darts out but a few yards from
you as you drive or walk along, but your eye is baffled for some
moments before you have her secret. Such a keen, feather-edged,
not to say spiteful little body, with the emphasis of those two
pairs of white quills in her tail given to every movement, and yet,
a less crabbed, less hasty nest, softer and more suggestive of shy
sylvan ways, than is hers, would be hard to find.

One day I was walking along the grassy borders of a beech and
maple wood with a friend when, as we came to a little low mound
of moss and grass, scarcely a foot high, I said, "This is just
the spot for a junco's nest," and as I stooped down to examine
it, out flew the bird. I had divined better than I knew. What a
pretty secret that little footstool of moss and grass-covered
earth held! How exquisite the nest, how exquisite the place, how
choice and harmonious the whole scene! How could these eggs long
escape the prowling foxes, skunks, coons, the sharp-eyed crows,
the searching mice and squirrels? They did not escape; in a day
or two they were gone.

Another junco's nest beside a Catskill trout stream sticks in my
memory. It was in an open grassy place amid the trees and bushes
near the highway. There were ladies in our trouting party and I
called them to come and see the treasure I had found.

"Where is it?" one of them said, as she stopped and looked a