Baltimore oriole loves to attach its nest to the swaying branches
of the tallest elms, making no attempt at concealment, but satisfied
if the position be high and the branch pendant. This nest would seem
to cost more time and skill than any other bird structure. A peculiar
flax-like substance seems to be always sought after and always found.
The nest when completed assumes the form of a large, suspended gourd.
The walls are thin but firm, and proof against the most driving rain.
The mouth is hemmed or overhanded with horse-hair, and the sides are
usually sewed through and through with the same.

Not particular as to the matter of secrecy, the bird is not particular
to the material, so that be of the nature of the strings or threads. A
lady friend once told me that, while working by an open window, one of
these birds approaching during her momentary absence, and, seizing a
skein of some kind of thread or yarn, made off with it to its
half-finished nest. But the perverse yarn caught fast in the branches,
and, in the bird's effort to extricate it, got hopelessly tangled. She
tugged away at it all day, but was finally obliged to content herself
with a few detached portions. The fluttering stings were an eyesore to
her ever after, and, passing and repassing, she would give them a
spiteful jerk, as much to say, "There is that confounded yarn that
gave me so much trouble."

From Pennsylvania, Vincent Barnard (to whom I am indebted for other
curious facts) sent me this interesting story of an oriole. He says a
friend of his curious in such things, on observing the bird beginning
to build, hung out near the prospective nest skeins of many-colored
zephyr yarn, which the eager artist readily appropriated. He managed
it so that the bird used nearly equal quantities of various, high,
bright colors. The nest was made unusually deep and capacious, and it
may be questioned if such a thing of beauty was ever before woven by
the cunning of a bird.

Nuttall, by far the most genial of American ornithologists, relates
the following:--

"A female (oriole), which I observed attentively, carried off to her
nest a piece of lamp-wick ten or twelve feet long. This long string
and many other shorter ones were left hanging out for a week before
both ends were wattled into the sides of the nest. Some other little
birds, making use of similar materials, at times twitched these
flowing ends, and generally brought out the busy Baltimore from her
o