r lining is made of
the silky down on dandelion-balls woven together with horse-hair. In
this dainty nest are laid four or five creamy white eggs, speckled with
lilac tints and red-browns. The unwelcome egg of the Cow-bird is often
found in the Yellow-bird's nest, but this Warbler builds a floor over
the egg, repeating the expedient, if the Cow-bird continues her
mischief, until sometimes a third story is erected.

A pair of Summer Yellow-birds, we are told, had built their nest in
a wild rose bush, and were rearing their family in a wilderness of
fragrant blossoms whose tinted petals dropped upon the dainty nest, or
settled upon the back of the brooding mother. The birds, however, did
not stay "to have their pictures taken," but their nest may be seen
among the roses.

The Yellow Warbler's song is

_Sweet-sweet-sweet-sweet-sweet-sweeter-sweeter_:

seven times repeated.

THE HERMIT THRUSH.

In John Burroughs' "Birds and Poets" this master singer is described
as the most melodious of our songsters, with the exception of the Wood
Thrush, a bird whose strains, more than any other's, express harmony and
serenity, and he complains that no merited poetic monument has yet been
reared to it. But there can be no good reason for complaining of the
absence of appreciative prose concerning the Hermit. One writer says:
"How pleasantly his notes greet the ear amid the shrieking of the wind
and the driving snow, or when in a calm and lucid interval of genial
weather we hear him sing, if possible, more richly than before. His
song reminds us of a coming season when the now dreary landscape will be
clothed in a blooming garb befitting the vernal year--of the song of the
Blackbird and Lark, and hosts of other tuneful throats which usher in
that lovely season. Should you disturb him when singing he usually drops
down and awaits your departure, though sometimes he merely retires to a
neighboring tree and warbles as sweetly as before."

In "Birdcraft" Mrs. Wright tells us, better than any one else, the story
of the Hermit. She says: "This spring, the first week in May, when
standing at the window about six o'clock in the morning, I heard an
unusual note, and listened, thinking it at first a Wood Thrush and then
a Thrasher, but soon finding that it was neither of these I opened the
window softly and looked among the near by shrubs, with my glass. The
wonderful melody ascended gradually in the scale as it progressed, now