hough it was in a
fork, it did not rest on it, but was suspended three inches above it, a
genuine hanging nest. It was three inches deep and wide, but drawn in
about the top to a width of not more than two inches, with a bit of
cotton and two small feathers for bedding. How five babies could grow up
in that little cup is a problem. The material was woven closely
together, and in addition stitched through and through, up and down, to
make a firm structure. Around and against it hung still six apples,
defrauded of their manifest destiny, and remaining the size of
hickory-nuts. Three twigs that ran up were cut off, but the fourth was
left, the tallest, the one sustaining the burden of the nest, and upon
which the young birds, one after another, had mounted to take their
first flight.

This pretty hammock, in its setting of leaves and apples, still swinging
from the apple boughs, I brought home as a souvenir of a charming bird
study.

XVII.

CEDAR-TREE LITTLE FOLK.

'T is there that the wild dove has her nest,
And whenever the branches stir,
She presses closer the eggs to her breast,
And her mate looks down on her.

CLARE BEATRICE COFFEY.

One of the voices that helped to make my June musical, and one more
constantly heard than any other, was that of the

"Mourning dove who grieves and grieves,
And lost! lost! lost! still seems to say,"

as the poet has it.

Now, while I dearly love the poets, and always long to enrich my plain
prose with gems from their verse, it is sometimes a little embarrassing,
because one is obliged to disagree with them. If they would only look a
little into the ways of birds, and not assert, in language so musical
that one can hardly resist it, that

"The birds come back to last year's nests,"

when rarely was a self-respecting bird known to shirk the labor of
building anew for every family; or sing, with Sill,

"He has lost his last year's love, I know,"

when he did not know any such thing; and add,

"A thrush forgets in a year,"

which I call a libel on one of our most intelligent birds; or cry, with
another singer,

"O voiceless swallow,"

when not one of the whole tribe is defrauded of a voice, and at least
one is an exquisite singer; or accuse the nightingale of the superfluous
idiocy of holding his (though they always say her) breast to a thorn as
he sings, as if he were so foolish as to imitate some forms of human
self-torture,--if they would