to
the moss stage when two women appeared and made their beds upon
the porch, and in the morning went to and fro with brooms, of
course. Then Ph[oe]be seemed to say to herself, "This is too
much," and she left her unfinished nest and resorted to the empty
hay-barn. Here she built a nest on one of the bark-covered end
timbers halfway up the big mow, not being quite as used to barns
and the exigencies of haying-times as swallows are, who build
their mud nests against the rafters in the peak. She had
deposited her eggs, when the haymakers began pitching hay into
the space beneath her; sweating, hurrying haymakers do not see or
regard the rights or wants of little birds. Like a rising tide
the fragrant hay rose and covered the timber and the nest, and
crept on up toward the swallow's unfledged family in the peak,
but did not quite reach it.

Ph[oe]be and her mate hung about the barn disconsolate for days,
and now, ten days later, she is hovering about my open door on
the floor below, evidently prospecting for another building-site.
I hope she will find me so quiet and my air so friendly that she
will choose a niche on the hewn timber over my head. Just this
moment I saw her snap up a flying "miller" in the orchard a few
rods away. She was compelled to swoop four times before she
intercepted that little moth in its unsteady, zigzagging flight.
She is an expert at this sort of thing; it is her business to
take her game on the wing; but the moths are experts in zigzag
flying, and Ph[oe]be missed her mark three times. I heard the
snap of her beak at each swoop. It is almost impossible for any
insectivorous bird except a flycatcher to take a moth or a
butterfly on the wing.

Last year in August the junco, or common snowbird, came into the
big barn and built her nest in the side of the haymow, only a few
feet from me. The clean, fragrant hay attracted her as it had
attracted me. One would have thought that in a haymow she had
nesting material near at hand. But no; her nest-building
instincts had to take the old rut; she must bring her own
material from without; the haymow was only the mossy bank or the
wood-side turf where her species had hidden their nests for
untold generations. She did not weave one spear of the farmer's
hay into her nest, but brought in the usual bits of dry grass and
weeds and horsehair and shaped the fabric after the old pattern,
tucking it well in under the drooping locks of hay. As I sat
morning aft