bove the handle. The pump
being in daily use, the nest was destroyed more than a score of times.
This jealous little wretch has the wise forethought, when the box in
which he builds contains two compartments, to fill up one of them, so
as to avoid the risk of troublesome neighbors.

The less skillful builders sometimes depart from their usual habit,
and take up with the abandoned nest of some other species. The blue
jay now and then lays in an old crow's nest or cuckoo's nest. The crow
blackbird, seized with a fit of indolence, drops its eggs in the
cavity of a decayed branch. I heard of a cuckoo that dispossessed a
robin of its nest; of another that set a blue jay adrift. Large, loose
structures, like the nests of the osprey and certain of the herons,
have been found with half a dozen nests of the blackbirds set in the
outer edges, like so many parasites, or, as Audubon says, like the
retainers about the rude court of a feudal baron.

The same birds breeding in a southern climate construct far less
elaborate nests than when breeding in a northern climate. Certain
species of waterfowl, that abandon their eggs to the sand and the sun
in the warmer zones, build a nest and sit in the usual way in
Labrador. In Georgia, the Baltimore oriole places its nest upon the
north side of the tree; in the Middle and Eastern States, it fixes it
upon the south or east side, and makes it much thicker and warmer. I
have seen one from the South that had some kind of coarse reed or
sedge woven into it, giving it an open-work appearance, like a basket.

Very few species use the same material uniformly. I have seen the nest
of the robin quite destitute of mud. In one instance it was composed
mainly of long black horse-hairs, arranged in a circular manner, with
a lining of fine yellow grass; the whole presenting quite a novel
appearance. In another case the nest was chiefly constructed of a
species of rock moss.

The nest for the second brood during the same season is often a mere
makeshift. The haste of the female to deposit her eggs as the season
advances seems very great, and the structure is apt to be prematurely
finished. I was recently reminded of this fact by happening, about the
last of July, to meet with several nests of the wood or bush sparrow
in a remote blackberry field. The nests with eggs were far less
elaborate and compact than the earlier nests, from which the young had
flown.

Day after day, as I go to a certain piece o