touching little incident
of bird life occurred to a caged female canary. Though unmated, it laid
some eggs, and the happy bird was so carried away by her feelings that
she would offer food to the eggs, and chatter and twitter, trying, as it
seemed, to encourage them to eat! The incident is hardly tragic, neither
is it comic.

Certain birds nest in the vicinity of our houses and outbuildings, or
even in and upon them, for protection from their enemies, but they often
thus expose themselves to a plague of the most deadly character.

I refer to the vermin with which their nests often swarm, and which kill
the young before they are fledged. In a state of nature this probably
never happens; at least I have never seen or heard of it happening to
nests placed in trees or under rocks. It is the curse of civilization
falling upon the birds which come too near man. The vermin, or the germ
of the vermin, is probably conveyed to the nest in hen's feathers, or in
straws and hairs picked up about the barn or hen-house. A robin's nest
upon your porch or in your summer-house will occasionally become an
intolerable nuisance from the swarms upon swarms of minute vermin with
which it is filled. The parent birds stem the tide as long as they can,
but are often compelled to leave the young to their terrible fate.

One season a phoebe-bird built on a projecting stone under the eaves
of the house, and all appeared to go well till the young were nearly
fledged, when the nest suddenly became a bit of purgatory. The birds
kept their places in their burning bed till they could hold no longer,
when they leaped forth and fell dead upon the ground.

After a delay of a week or more, during which I imagine the parent
birds purified themselves by every means known to them, the couple built
another nest a few yards from the first, and proceeded to rear a second
brood; but the new nest developed into the same bed of torment that the
first did, and the three young birds, nearly ready to fly, perished as
they sat within it. The parent birds then left the place as if it had
been accursed.

I imagine the smaller birds have an enemy in our native white-footed
mouse, though I have not proof enough to convict him. But one season the
nest of a chickadee which I was observing was broken up in a position
where nothing but a mouse could have reached it. The bird had chosen a
cavity in the limb of an apple-tree which stood but a few yards from the
house. The ca