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My Garden Acquaintance by James Russell Lowell
page 16 of 24 (66%)
forth without insult. The golden robins, especially, would chase
him as far as I could follow with my eye, making him duck clumsily
to avoid their importunate bills. I do not believe, however, that he
robbed any nests hereabouts, for the refuse of the gas-works,
which, in our free-and-easy community, is allowed to poison the
river, supplied him with dead alewives in abundance. I used to
watch him making his periodical visits to the salt-marshes and
coming back with a fish in his beak to his young savages, who, no
doubt, like it in that condition which makes it savory to the
Kanakas and other corvine races of men.

(1) See Rousseau's *La Nouvelle Heloise.*

Orioles are in great plenty with me. I have seen seven males
flashing about the garden at once. A merry crew of them swing
their hammocks from the pendulous boughs. During one of these
later years, when the canker-worms stripped our elms as bare as
winter, these birds went to the trouble of rebuilding their unroofed
nests, and chose for the purpose trees which are safe from those
swarming vandals, such as the ash and the button-wood. One year
a pair (disturbed, I suppose, elsewhere) built a second next in an
elm within a few yards of the house. My friend, Edward E. Hale,
told me once that the oriole rejected from his web all strands of
brilliant color, and I thought it a striking example of that instinct of
concealment noticeable in many birds, though it should seem in this
instance that the nest was amply protected by its position from all
marauders but owls and squirrels. Last year, however, I had the
fullest proof that Mr. Hale was mistaken. A pair of orioles built on
the lowest trailer of a weeping elm, which hung within ten feet of
our drawing-room window, and so low that I could reach it from
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