and roadside would strive in vain to excel. But the male would have nothing at all to do with the matter, but remained the same cold, indifferent being as I found him to be upon my first introduction.

Some nests are curious on account of shape. The birds often, it would seem, try their very best to see how oddly they can build their homes. The little Acadian Flycatcher, so common in Eastern Pennsylvania during the breeding-season, sometimes appears to be controlled by cranky ideas with regard to building. Dry blossoms of the hickory are the materials it ordinarily uses, and they can always be obtained whenever needed, but in a nest discovered by the writer in 1882, not a blossom was to be found, but in place of them there were long, stringy fibres of the inner bark of some species of herbaceous plant, which the birds had modelled into a compactly-built, shallow, saucer-like cavity, and from which they had caused to depend a gradually tapering train of the same for nearly nine inches.

The King Bird, a distant relative of the Flycatcher, often displays as much eccentricity. Once upon a time a pair of King Birds took a fancy to an old apple-tree that stood within a few yards of my Germantown home. It was certainly not a place of quiet and retirement, for scores of noisy, dirty children daily resorted to its leafy shelter for coolness and pastime. But the birds were not the least disquieted. They had fixed their minds upon the spot, and build they did. The nest was posed between a forked branch, just out of the reach of the urchins. It was a crazy affair. Black, slender roots, wrinkled and knotted and tendrilled, made up the body of the fabric. As it was nearing completion, the opportune discovery of a bunch of carpet rags was hailed with delight. They were instantly appropriated, and promptly adjusted to the outside, but in such a manner that long ends, some fourteen inches in length, were made to project from the sides and bottom. Whether all this was for ornament or protection, or for both, I could not say, but

I am inclined to think that safety was uppermost in the minds of the builders, for, looking from below at the nest it seemed but a mass of rags that had been thrown into a treecrotch, which, the birds perceiving, and its close resemblance to an entangled bunch, had utilized.

Certainly no more beautiful nests in shape exist than the spherical in form. The Long-billed Marsh Wren builds a nest of this type. Upon its arrival in the spring it seeks the inland swamps, or the brackish marshes of the sea-shore, where, amid the splatterdocks of the former and reeds of the latter, it finds suitable shelter and protection. There, day

summer.

in and day out, during its entire summer stay, it pursues the even tenor of its life, happy and contented, never caring, like many of its remoter kin, for the charmed circle of man. Active, energetic and buoyant with hope, it skips about the tall rank herbage, in every direction, in quest of insects, making its presence known and felt by the lively chattering song, which resembles more nearly the sounds of an insect than those of a bird, which emanates from its grassy haunts. As these birds reach their breeding-grounds early in May, nest-building is soon begun, but so secret and mysterious are their movements at first, that we hardly know anything of their presence, except when they are colonized for the The labor of building is entered into with considerable alacrity, and is mainly the result of the combined labor of both birds. Their nests are usually placed in low bushes, a few feet above the ground, or woven into the tops of sedges out of the reach of ordinary tides; but in very rare instances upon the ground in the midst of a clump of grasses. Ground nests are loosely-constructed affairs, which is not the case with those that are elevated to the tops of tussocks, or to the branches of shrubs and trees, which require more compactness and a better finish. The most beautiful, as well as artistic, nest which I have ever seen is the one shown in the cut. This nest was discovered in the vicinity of Philadelphia in the summer of 1878. A willow-branch, some fifteen feet above the ground, which was bifurcated, was made to do service. No ordinary skill was that which surmounted the seemingly insuperable difficulty of building a nest, not pensile in character, to such a swaying branch. That the birds accomplished the feat the nest itself was the evidence. In form this nest was nearly globular, four and a half and five inches in the two diameters. It was woven of the broad leaves of a species of scirpus, closely and evenly, and had its interstices well seamed with brownish cottony down. A thin delicate curtain of gauze, of the same material, hung around