vity was deep, and the entrance to it, which was ten feet
from the ground, was small. Barely light enough was admitted, when the
sun was in the most favorable position, to enable one to make out the
number of eggs, which was six, at the bottom of the dim interior. While
one was peering in and trying to get his head out of his own light, the
bird would startle him by a queer kind of puffing sound. She would not
leave her nest like most birds, but really tried to blow or scare the
intruder away; and after repeated experiments I could hardly refrain
from jerking my head back when that little explosion of sound came
up from the dark interior. One night, when incubation was about half
finished, the nest was harried. A slight trace of hair or fur at the
entrance led me to infer that some small animal was the robber. A weasel
might have done it, as they sometimes climb trees, but I doubt if either
a squirrel or a rat could have passed the entrance.

Probably few persons have ever suspected the cat-bird of being an
egg-sucker; I do not know that she has ever been accused of such a
thing, but there is something uncanny and disagreeable about her, which
I at once understood, when I one day caught her in the very act of going
through a nest of eggs.

A pair of the least fly-catchers, the bird which says chebec, chebec,
and is a small edition of the pewee, one season built their nest where
I had them for many hours each day under my observation. The nest was
a very snug and compact structure placed in the forks of a small maple
about twelve feet from the ground. The season before, a red squirrel
had harried the nest of a wood-thrush in this same tree, and I was
apprehensive that he would serve the fly-catchers the same trick; so,
as I sat with my book in a summer-house near by, I kept my loaded gun
within easy reach. One egg was laid, and the next morning, as I made my
daily inspection of the nest, only a fragment of its empty shell was
to be found. This I removed, mentally imprecating the rogue of a red
squirrel. The birds were much disturbed by the event, but did not desert
the nest, as I had feared they would, but after much inspection of it
and many consultations together, concluded, it seems, to try again. Two
more eggs were laid, when one day I heard the birds utter a sharp cry,
and on looking up I saw a cat-bird perched upon the rim of the nest,
hastily devouring the eggs. I soon regretted my precipitation in killing
her, b