d do not like to be spied
upon. But I could not have gauged my distance properly; for, though I
thought I knew the exact cedar-tree she had chosen, I found, to my
dismay and regret afterward, that no sign of a nest was there, or
thereabout.

Another pair went farther, and held out even more delusive hopes; they
actually built a nest in a neighbor's yard, the family in the house
maintaining an appearance of the utmost indifference, so as not to alarm
the birds till they were committed to that nest. For so little does
madam regard the labor of building, and so fickle is she in her fancies,
that she thinks nothing of preparing at least two nests before she
settles on one. The nest was made on a big branch of cedar, perhaps
seven feet from the ground,--a rough affair, as this bird always makes.
In it she even placed an egg, and then, for some undiscovered reason, it
was abandoned, and they took their domestic joys and sorrows elsewhere.

But now, at last, word came to me of an occupied nest to be seen at a
certain house, and I started at once for it. It was up a shady country
lane, with a meadow-lark field on one side, and a bobolink meadow on the
other. The lark mounted the fence, and delivered his strange sputtering
cry,--the first I had ever heard from him (or her, for I believe this is
the female's utterance). But the dear little bobolink soared around my
head, and let fall his happy trills; then suddenly, as Lowell
delightfully pictures him,--

"Remembering duty, in mid-quaver stops,
Just ere he sweeps o'er rapture's tremulous brink,
And 'twixt the winrows most demurely drops,
A decorous bird of business, who provides
For his brown mate and fledglings six besides,
And looks from right to left, a farmer mid his crops."

Nothing less attractive than a cardinal family could draw me away from
these rival allurements, but I went on.

The cardinal's bower was the prettiest of the summer, built in a
climbing rose which ran riot over a trellis beside a kitchen door. The
vine was loaded with buds just beginning to unfold their green wraps to
flood the place with beauty and fragrance, and the nest was so carefully
tucked away behind the leaves that it could not be seen from the front.
Whether from confidence in the two or three residents of the cottage, or
because the house was alone so many hours of the day,--the occupants
being students, and absent most of the time,--the birds had taken no
account of a windo