ss, eager to see it again.
This is the way my fairy-like mother administered the staff of life to
her tender birdlings. Alighting on the edge of the nest, she leaned
over, and with her beak jerked a little head into sight above the edge;
then down the baby's throat she thrust her long beak its whole length;
and it looked actually longer than the youngster itself. Then she
prodded and shook the unfortunate nestling, who seemed to hold on, till
I wondered his head did not come off. It was truly fearful to witness.
In a moment, shaking off, apparently with difficulty, that one, who
dropped out of sight, she jerked up the other, and treated it in the
same rough way, shaking her own body from head to tail by her exertion.
Thus alternately she fed them, three or four times, before she finished;
and then she calmly slipped on to the nest, wriggling and twisting about
as if she were pawing them over with her feet. There she sat for five or
six minutes before darting away for fresh supplies, while I wondered if
the two victims of this Spartan method were lying dead, stabbed to
death, or smothered, by their own mother. But I did her tenderness and
her motherhood injustice. Regularly every half hour she came and
repeated this murderous-looking process, unless, as often happened,
she was frightened away by the people about.

Till her little ones were two weeks old, the devoted if apparently
ungentle parent continued to feed them at intervals of thirty minutes,
the neck-dislocating performance being always as violent as I have
described. After that date she came more frequently, every fifteen or
twenty minutes, and their development went on more rapidly. At the early
age of five and six days, even before their eyes were open, the young
birds began to show that they had minds of their own, and knew when they
had enough (which some folk bigger than birds never know). When one was
sufficiently filled, or sufficiently racked, it would shut its mouth and
refuse to open, though mamma touched it gently with her beak.

"The world slipped away and I was in fairyland," wrote my old friend the
Enthusiast, while watching, in another part of the country that same
summer, the nest-building of a hummingbird. To me, also, the study of
the life and affairs of this nest, to which I gave nearly every hour of
daylight for weeks, seemed like a glimpse into that land of childhood's
dreams, excepting when the outer world obtruded too rudely. For the life