mate. At intervals of two or three minutes she would appear with a
small tuft of some cottony substance in her beak, dart a few times
through and around the tree, and alighting quickly in the nest arrange
the material she had brought, using her breast as a model.

The other nest I discovered in a dense forest on the side of a
mountain. The sitting bird was disturbed as I passed beneath her. The
whirring of her wings arrested my attention, when, after a short
pause, I had the good luck to see, through an opening in the leaves,
the bird return to her nest, which appeared like a mere wart or
excrescence on a small branch. The humming-bird, unlike all others,
does not alight upon the nest, but flies into it. She enters it as
quick as a flash, but as light as any feather. Two eggs are the
complement. They are perfectly white, and so frail that only a woman's
fingers may touch them. Incubation lasts about ten days. In a week the
young have flown.

The only nest like the humming-bird's, and comparable to it in
neatness and symmetry, is that of the blue-gray gnat-catcher. This is
often saddled upon the limb in the same manner, though it is generally
more or less pendent; it is deep and soft, composed mostly of some
vegetable down, covered all over with delicate tree-lichens, and,
except that it is much larger, appears almost identical with the nest
of the humming-bird.

But the nest of nests, the ideal nest, after we have left the deep
woods, is unquestionably that of the Baltimore oriole. It is the only
perfectly pensile nest we have. The nest of the orchard oriole is
indeed mainly so, but this bird generally builds lower and shallower,
more after the manner of the vireos.