dead
log and toadstools are here, but dainty shapes with billions of
possibilities for new life, new beauties, new thoughts.

* * * * *

[Illustration: YOUNG BLUE-JAY TRYING TO CLIMB BACK TO ITS NEST

"THE WOOD THRUSH HAS A LATE NEST IN A YOUNG ELM" (p. 41)

"THE CHIPMUNK HOLDS IN HIS PAWS A BIT OF BREAD" (p. 20)]

Goldfinches ride on the billows of the air, now folding their pinions
and shooting silently downward into the trough of the sea, then
opening their wings and beating their way upwards, singing meanwhile.
Going over the woods they fly twenty to thirty feet above the tops of
the tallest trees, but when they reach the meadow lands they drop
to about the same height above the surface of the ground. Only a few
of them are nesting yet. The tall thistle by the roadside is nearly
ten feet high, but its heads have not fully opened. They like its down
for their nests and its seeds to feed the fledgelings. They fly in
pairs often and in the evenings they cling prettily to the catnip by
the pasture fence, digging into each calyx for its four sweet nutlets.
The woodthrush has a late nest in a young elm; her first family was
eaten by the blue-jays just after the hatching,--so were the young
grosbeaks in a nearby tree, but the cedar waxwings were slain and
eaten by the cannibalistic grackles. A blue-jay is just approaching
the wood pewee's nest in the burr oak, but the doughty husband does
battle with the fierceness of a kingbird and chases him away. Three
tiny birdlings, covered with hairs soft and white as the down of a
thistle, are in the nest, which is saddled snugly to the fork of a
horizontal tree. In another nest, near by, the three eggs have only
just been laid. The path which used to run under the over-hanging
trees is grown up with grasses. Here the slender rush grows best, and
makes a dark crease among the taller and lighter-green grasses,
showing where the path winds. Twenty feet overhead, on the slender
branch of a white oak, is a tiny knot, looking scarcely larger than
the cup of a mossy-cup acorn. It is the nest of the ruby-throated
hummingbird, so well concealed by the leaves and by the lichens
fastened to its exterior that it would not have been noticed at all
but for the whirling wings of the exquisite creature a month ago. Her
two tiny eggs have since been safely hatched and the young birds
reared; now the nest is empty, a prize to be taken and preserved for
future st