ir clearest and
strongest notes of joy; then, that they hover constantly near their
nests; and it is very easy to stop their music.

So there remained in the nest in the maple stump four little helpless
orphan bluebirds, and in the swaying nest in the elm-tree over the brook
were four young orioles with only the mother bird to care for them. The
widowed oriole fluttered about and beat her wings against the bushes in
vain search for her lost love--for birds love as madly, and, I have
sometimes thought, more faithfully than do human beings. But her
children clamored, and the oriole had the mother instinct as well as the
faithful love in her, and so she went to work for them. She didn't know
how to get food for them very well at first, for bird wives and husbands
have in some ways the same relations that we human beings have when we
are wives and husbands. The male oriole, who had been learning where the
insects and worms are, where whatever is good for little birds is, all
through the time while the female bird is sitting on the nest, must
necessarily know much more than his wife as to where things to eat for
the children may be found nearest and most easily and swiftly. That is
the great lesson the male bird learns while the female is sitting on the
eggs and maturing into life the new creatures whose birth and being
shall make this little loving couple happy in the way the good God has
designated one form of happiness shall come to His creatures, be they
with or without feathers.

The forlorn mother did as best she could. She fluttered through brakes
and bushes seeking food for her young, but her children did not thrive
very well. She worked so hard for them--human mothers and bird mothers
are very much alike in this way--that she became thin and weak, and with
each day that passed she brought less food to the little ones in the
wonderfully constructed nest which she and her husband had made in the
spring, when the smell of the liverworts was in the air, and muskrats
swam together and made love to each other in the creek below. She
sometimes, in the midst of her trouble (the trouble which came because
my sweet woman, must have a bird's feather in her hat) would think of
that springtime homemaking, and then this poor little widow would give a
little bird gasp. That was all. One day she had searched hard for food
for her young, for as they grew bigger they demanded more and were more
arrogantly hungry. As she perched to r