d white breast immaculate, when she had shaken
herself out, and darted out and drawn back many times her long
bristle-like tongue, she would sometimes hover along before the tips of
the fence-stakes, which were like laths, held an inch apart by
wires,--collecting, I suppose, the tiny spiders which were to be found
there. She always returned to the honeysuckle, however, to finish her
repast, opening and closing her tail as one flirts a fan, while the
breeze made by her wings agitated the leaves for two feet around her.
Should a blossom just ready to fall come off on her beak like a coral
case, as it sometimes did, she was indignant indeed; she jerked herself
back and flung it off with an air that was comical to see.

When the hot wind blew, the little creature seemed to feel the
discomfort that bigger ones did: she sat with open beak as though
panting for breath; she flew around with legs hanging, and even alighted
on a convenient leaf or cluster of flowers, while she rifled a blossom,
standing with sturdy little legs far apart, while stretching up to reach
the bloom she desired.

Two statements of the books were not true in the case of this bird: she
did not sit on a twig upright like an owl or a hawk, but held her body
exactly as does a robin or sparrow; and she did fly backward and
sideways, as well as forward.

Toward the end of June my tiny visitor began to make longer intervals
between her calls, and when she did appear she was always in too great
haste to stop; she passed rapidly over half a dozen blossoms, and then
flitted away. Past were the days of loitering about on poplar twigs or
preening herself on the peach-tree. It was plain that she had set up a
home for herself, and the mussy state of her once nicely kept breast
feathers told the tale,--she had a nest somewhere. Vainly, however, did
I try to track her home: she either took her way like an arrow across
the garden to a row of very tall locusts, where a hundred humming-birds'
nests might have been hidden, or turned the other way over a neighbor's
field to a cluster of thickly grown apple-trees, equally impossible to
search. If she had always gone one way I might have tried to follow, but
to look for her infinitesimal nest at opposite poles of the earth was
too discouraging, even if the weather had been cool enough for such
exertion.

When at last I could endure the wind and the dust and the heat no
longer, and stood one morning on the porch, waiting fo