oliest
happiness--Faith!

We must not now go a bird-nesting, but first time we do we shall put
Bishop Mant's "Months" in our pocket. The good Bishop--who must have
been an indefatigable bird-nester in his boyhood--though we answer for
him that he never stole but one egg out of four, and left undisturbed
the callow young--treats of those beauteous and wondrous structures in a
style that might make Professor Rennie jealous, who has written like a
Vitruvius on the architecture of birds. He expatiates with uncontrolled
delight on the unwearied activity of the architects, who, without any
apprenticeship to the trade, are journeymen, nay, master-builders, the
first spring of their full-fledged lives; with no other tools but a
bill, unless we count their claws, which however seem, and that only in
some kinds, to be used but in carrying materials. With their breasts and
whole bodies, indeed, most of them round off the soft insides of their
procreant cradles, till they fit each brooding bunch of feathers to a
hairbreadth, as it sits close and low on eggs or eyeless young, a
_leetle_ higher raised up above their gaping babies, as they wax from
downy infancy into plumier childhood, which they do how swiftly! and
how soon have they flown! You look some sunny morning into the bush, and
the abode in which they seemed so _cosy_ the day before is utterly
forsaken by the joyous ingrates--now feebly fluttering in the narrow
grove, to them a wide world teeming with delight and wonder--to be
thought of never more. With all the various materials used by them in
building their different domiciles, the Bishop is as familiar as with
the sole material of his own wig--though, by the by, last time we had
the pleasure of seeing and sitting by him, he wore his own hair--"but
that not much;" for, like our own, his sconce was bald, and, like it,
showed the organ of constructiveness as fully developed as Christopher
or a Chaffinch. He is perfectly well acquainted, too, with all the
diversities of their modes of building--their orders of
architecture--and eke with all those of situation chosen by the
kinds--whether seemingly simple, in cunning that deceives by a show of
carelessness and heedlessness of notice, or with craft of concealment
that baffles the most searching eye--hanging their beloved secret in
gloom not impervious to sun and air--or, trustful in man's love of his
own home, affixing the nest beneath the eaves, or in the flowers of the
latt