some perching crow, and just before
touching it to turn at a hairbreadth and rebound in the air so fast
that the wings of the swooper whirred with a sound like distant thunder.
Sometimes one crow would lower his head, raise every feather, and coming
close to another would gurgle out a long note like. What did it all
mean? I soon learned. They were making love and pairing off. The males
were showing off their wing powers and their voices to the lady crows.
And they must have been highly appreciated, for by the middle of April
all had mated and had scattered over the country for their honeymoon,
leaving the sombre old pines of Castle Frank deserted and silent.

II

The Sugar Loaf hill stands alone in the Don Valley. It is still covered
with woods that join with those of Castle Frank, a quarter of a mile
off in the woods, between the two hills, is a pine-tree in whose top
is a deserted hawk's nest. Every Toronto school-boy knows the nest, and,
excepting that I had once shot a black squirrel on its edge, no one had
ever seen a sign of life about it. There it was year after year, ragged
and old, and falling to pieces. Yet, strange to tell, in all that time
it never did drop to pieces, like other old nests.

One morning in May I was out at gray dawn, and stealing gently through
the woods, whose dead leaves were so wet that no rustle was made. I
chanced to pass under the old nest, and was surprised to see a black
tail sticking over the edge. I struck the tree a smart blow, off flew a
crow, and the secret was out. I had long suspected that a pair of
crows nested each year about the pines, but now I realized that it was
Silverspot and his wife. The old nest was theirs, and they were too wise
to give it an air of spring-cleaning and housekeeping each year. Here
they had nested for long, though guns in the hands of men and boys
hungry to shoot crows were carried under their home every day. I never
surprised the old fellow again, though I several times saw him through
my telescope.

One day while watching I saw a crow crossing the Don Valley with
something white in his beak. He flew to the mouth of the Rosedale Brook,
then took a short flight to the Beaver Elm. There he dropped the white
object, and looking about gave inc a chance to recognize my old friend
Silverspot. After a minute he picked up the white thing--a shell--and
walked over past the spring, and here, among the docks and the
skunk-cabbages, he unearthed a pile of s