species, which always foists its egg upon other birds; or whether, on
the other hand, it is not mending its manners in this respect. It has
but little to unlearn or to forget in the one case, but great progress
to make in the other. How far is its rudimentary nest--a mere platform
of coarse twigs and dry stalks of weeds--from the deep, compact, finely
woven and finely modeled nest of the goldfinch or the kingbird, and
what a gulf between its indifference toward its young and their
solicitude! Its irregular manner of laying also seems better suited to
a parasite like our cowbird, or the European cuckoo, than to a regular
nest-builder.

This observer, like most sharp-eyed persons, sees plenty of interesting
things as he goes about his work. He one day saw a white swallow, which
is of rare occurrence. He saw a bird, a sparrow he thinks, fly against
the side of a horse and fill his beak with hair from the loosened coat
of the animal. He saw a shrike pursue a chickadee, when the latter
escaped by taking refuge in a small hole in a tree. One day in early
spring he saw two hen-hawks, that were circling and screaming high in
air, approach each other, extend a claw, and, clasping them together,
fall toward the earth, flapping and struggling as if they were tied
together; on nearing the ground they separated and soared aloft again.
He supposed that it was not a passage of war but of love, and that the
hawks were toying fondly with each other.

He further relates a curious circumstance of finding a hummingbird in
the upper part of a barn with its bill stuck fast in a crack of one of
the large timbers, dead, of course, with wings extended, and as dry as
a chip. The bird seems to have died, as it had lived, on the wing, and
its last act was indeed a ghastly parody of its living career. Fancy
this nimble, flashing sprite, whose life was passed probing the honeyed