occasions that one sees them creeping about the trunks or larger limbs.
Unlike their two Northern relatives, they are eminently social, often
traveling in small flocks, even in the breeding season, and keeping up
an almost incessant chorus of shrill twitters as they flit hither and
thither through the woods. The first one to come near me was full of
inquisitiveness; he flew back and forth past my head, exactly as
chickadees do in a similar mood, and once seemed almost ready to alight
on my hat. "Let us have a look at this stranger," he appeared to be
saying. Possibly his nest was not far off, but I made no search for it.
Afterwards I found two nests, one in a low stump, and one in the trunk
of a pine, fifteen or twenty feet from the ground. Both of them
contained young ones (March 31 and April 2), as I knew by the continual
goings-in-and-out of the fathers and mothers. In dress the brown-head is
dingy, with little or nothing of the neat and attractive appearance of
our New England nuthatches.

In this pine-wood on the road to Moultrie I found no sign of the new
woodpecker or the new sparrow. Nor was I greatly disappointed. The place
itself was a sufficient novelty,--the place and the summer weather. The
pines murmured overhead, and the palmettos rustled all about. Now a
butterfly fluttered past me, and now a dragonfly. More than one little
flock of tree swallows went over the wood, and once a pair of phoebes
amused me by an uncommonly pretty lover's quarrel. Truly it was a
pleasant hour. In the midst of it there came along a man in a cart, with
a load of wood. We exchanged the time of day, and I remarked upon the
smallness of his load. Yes, he said; but it was a pretty heavy load to
drag seven or eight miles over such roads. Possibly he understood me as
implying that he seemed to be in rather small business, although I had
no such purpose, for he went on to say: "In 1861, when this beautiful
war broke out between our countries, my father owned niggers. We didn't