ameter, that leaned out over the water, and from which the top had
been broken. The hole, round and firm, was ten or twelve feet above us.
After considerable effort I succeeded in breaking the stub off near the
ground, and brought it down into the boat.

"Just the thing," I said; "surely the bluebirds will prefer this to an
artificial box." But, lo and behold, it already had bluebirds in it! We
had not heard a sound or seen a feather till the trunk was in our hands,
when, on peering into the cavity, we discovered two young bluebirds
about half grown. This was a predicament indeed!

Well, the only thing we could do was to stand the tree-trunk up again as
well as we could, and as near as we could to where it had stood before.
This was no easy thing. But after a time we had it fairly well replaced,
one end standing in the mud of the shallow water and the other resting
against a tree. This left the hole to the nest about ten feet below and
to one side of its former position. Just then we heard the voice of one
of the parent birds, and we quickly paddled to the other side of the
stream, fifty feet away, to watch her proceedings, saying to each other,
"Too bad! too bad!" The mother bird had a large beetle in her beak.
She alighted upon a limb a few feet above the former site of her nest,
looked down upon us, uttered a note or two, and then dropped down
confidently to the point in the vacant air where the entrance to her
nest had been but a few moments before. Here she hovered on the wing
a second or two, looking for something that was not there, and then
returned to the perch she had just left, apparently not a little
disturbed. She hammered the beetle rather excitedly upon the limb a few
times, as if it were in some way at fault, then dropped down to try for
her nest again. Only vacant air there! She hovers and hovers, her blue
wings flickering in the checkered light; surely that precious hole MUST
be there; but no, again she is baffled, and again she returns to her
perch, and mauls the poor beetle till it must be reduced to a pulp. Then
she makes a third attempt, then a fourth, and a fifth, and a sixth, till
she becomes very much excited. "What could have happened? Am I dreaming?
Has that beetle hoodooed me?" she seems to say, and in her dismay she
lets the bug drop, and looks bewilderedly about her. Then she flies away
through the woods, calling. "Going for her mate," I said to Ted. "She is
in deep trouble, and she wants s