Gordon Cumming himself, on a good day's hunt,) and their eggs are like
domes.

Now, do not you be like the foolish princess, and desire a roc's egg; it
will prove a stone, the egg of a rock, indeed. Be content rather with this
ostrich-egg I send you; with your own slender fingers lift the
lid;--pretty, is it not, the tea-service I send you? The tidy warblers
threw out the emptied shells; one by one I picked them up, and have made
cups and saucers, bowls and pitchers for you: a roc's egg never held
anything one-half so fine.

You will say I am a fairy, as brother Evelyn says, when I relate to him the
fine sights and sounds I have seen and heard in the woods. No, but the
little silent people are very good to me.

Let me, then, go on my bird's-egging and tell you one more fact about our
fairy, our Humming-Bird. Audubon says "that an all-wise Providence has made
this little hero an exception to a rule which prevails almost universally
through Nature,--namely, that the smallest species of a tribe are the most
prolific. The eagle lays one, sometimes two eggs; the small European wren
fifteen; the humming-bird two: and yet this latter is abundantly more
numerous in America than the wren in Europe." All on account of his
wonderful courage, admirable instinct, or whatever it is that guards and
guides him so unerringly.

You see we may well love him whom
Nature herself loves so dearly.

"Ce que Dieu garde est bien garde."