harmonized perfectly with the bits of bark, sticks, etc., lying about.
My eye rested upon them for the second time before I made them out.
They hugged the nest very closely, but as I put down my hand they
scampered off with loud cries for help, which caused the parent birds
to place themselves almost within my reach. The nest was merely a
little dry grass arranged in a thick bed of dry leaves.

This was amid a thick undergrowth. Moving on into a passage of large,
stately hemlocks, with only here and there a small beech or maple
rising up into the perennial twilight, I paused to make out a note
which was entirely new to me. It is still in my ear. Though
unmistakably a bird note, it yet suggested the bleating of a tiny
lambkin. Presently the birds appeared,--a pair of the solitary vireo.
They came flitting from point to point, alighting only for a moment at
a time, the male silent, but the female uttering this strange, tender
note. It was a rendering into some new sylvan dialect of the human
sentiment of maidenly love. It was really pathetic in its sweetness
and childlike confidence and joy. I soon discovered that the pair were
building a nest upon a low branch a few yards from me. The male flew
cautiously to the spot, and adjusted something, and the twain moved
on, the female calling to her mate at intervals, _love-e, love-e_,
with a cadence and tenderness in the tone that rang in the ear long
afterward. The nest was suspended to the fork of a small branch, as is
usual with the vireos, plentifully lined with lichens, and bound and
rebound with masses of coarse spider-webs. There was no attempt at
concealment except in the neutral tints, which made it look like a
natural growth of the dim, gray woods.

Continuing my random walk, I next paused in a low part of the woods,
where the larger trees began to give place to a thick second growth