violets and run wild in our forest; since for several weeks we were
encouraged to live out of doors as far away as we could keep from the
house where we were not wanted. For just then great alterations were
being made to render it habitable: new rooms were being added on to
the old building, wooden flooring laid over the old bricks and tiles,
and the half-rotten thatch, a haunt of rats and the home of centipedes
and of many other hybernating creeping things, was being stripped off
to be replaced by a clean healthy wooden roof. For me it was no
hardship to be sent away to make my playground in that wooded
wonderland. The trees, both fruit and shade, were of many kinds, and
belonged to two widely-separated periods. The first were the old trees
planted by some tree-loving owner a century or more before our time,
and the second the others which had been put in a generation or two
later to fill up some gaps and vacant places and for the sake of a
greater variety.

The biggest of the old trees, which I shall describe first, was a red
willow growing by itself within forty yards of the house. This is a
native tree, and derives its specific name _rubra,_ as well as its
vernacular name, from the reddish colour of the rough bark. It grows
to a great size, like the black poplar, but has long narrow leaves
like those of the weeping willow. In summer I was never tired of
watching this tree, since high up in one of the branches, which in
those days seemed to me "so close against the sky," a scissor-tail
tyrant-bird always had its nest, and this high open exposed nest was a
constant attraction to the common brown carrion-hawk, called
_chimango_--a hawk with the carrion-crow's habit of perpetually
loitering about in search of eggs and fledglings.

The scissor-tail is one of the most courageous of that hawk-hating,