cheery solos, scarcely pausing for breath or food, now
sitting on the topmost twig of a dead apple tree in the orchard, now
amid the screening foliage of a maple in the yard, and anon on the
other side of the street in a stately cottonwood. But where is that
modest little personage, his wife? She is seldom heard, and almost as
seldom seen. It is really remarkable--her gift of concealment. When
she builds her nest is a mystery. It is often so deftly hidden that
you would not be likely to find it in a long hunt. In the spring of
1898 a pair of orchard orioles took up their residence in the trees
about my house, the male singing his brisk overtures, the female seen
only at flitting intervals and never heard. Watch as I would, I could
not surprise her laying the timbers of her cottage, which I felt sure
was being built somewhere in the trees. Indeed, I did not discover it
until autumn came, long after the orioles, old and young, had taken
flight to a balmier clime, and the trees were stripped of their leaves,
when, lo! it appeared in plain view on one of the trees on the opposite
side of the street, the very place where I had not thought of looking
for it.

The Baltimore orioles as a rule are not so secretive; yet during the
summer of 1898 a pair of these firebirds led me a fruitless chase.
Their secret was not divulged until the leaves had fallen the next
autumn, when there the nest hung in the midst of a tall cottonwood in
my back yard close to the house. Lord Baltimore and his mate usually
suspend their nests on the outer branches of the trees, where they are
not hard to discover, but this pair did not follow the common formula,
for the nest was placed in the thickest part of the foliage, so that it
was impossible to see it from the ground until the branches were bare.

Of all the malaperts of birddom none excel and few equal the white-eyed
vireo for volubility and downright audacity. All his songs--and he has
quite a respectable list of them--seem to be either a protest or a
challenge; a protest against your intrusion into his precincts, a
challenge to find him and his nest if you can. Again and again in
Kansas I crept into their bushy coverts just for the purpose of
receiving a sound scolding. Such a berating did they give me, telling
me of all my faults and foibles, that I certainly ought to remain
humble all the rest of my days. A half dozen viragoes could not have
done better--that is, worse. They wou