with a pinkish tinge, and sparingly sprinkled with lilac spots or
specks, and having a well-defined lilac ring at the larger end."

From Nynee Tal, Colonel G.F.L. Marshall writes:--"This species makes
a beautifully neat nest of fine moss and lichens, globular, with
side entrance, and thickly lined with soft feathers. A nest found on
Cheena, above Nynee Tal, on the 24th May, 1873, at an elevation of
about 7000 feet, was wedged into a fork at the end of a bough of a
cypress tree, about 10 feet from the ground, the entrance turned
inwards towards the trunk of the tree. It contained one tiny egg,
white, with a dark cloudy zone round the larger end.

"About the 10th of May, at Naini Tal, I was watching one of these
little birds, which kept hanging about a small rhododendron stump
about 2 feet high, with very few leaves on it, but I could see no
nest. A few days later I saw the bird carry a big caterpillar to the
same stump and come away shortly without it; so I looked more
closely and found the nest, containing nearly full-fledged young, so
beautifully wedged into the stump that it appeared to be part of it,
and nothing but the tiny circular entrance revealed that the nest was
there. It was the best-concealed nest for that style of position that
I have ever seen."

These tiny eggs, almost smaller than those of any European bird that
I know, are broad ovals, sometimes almost globular, but generally
somewhat compressed towards one end, so as to assume something of a
pyriform shape. They are almost entirely glossless, have a pinkish or
at times creamy-white ground, and exhibit a conspicuous reddish or
purple zone towards the large end, composed of multitudes of minute
spots almost confluent, and interspaced with a purplish cloud. Faint