inge of water-grass. Some of
them sat quite up on their tails by a vigorous use of their wings, and
stretched their necks to look over the low bank. Just keeping still
saved me. In five minutes they were quiet again; even the young duck
seemed to have forgotten her vanity and gone to sleep with the others.

Two or three hours I lay thus and watched them through the grass,
spying very rudely, no doubt, into the seclusion of their home life.
As the long shadow of the western hill stretched across the pool till
it darkened the eastern bank, the ducks awoke one by one from their
nap, and began to stir about in preparation for departure. Soon they
were collected at the center of the open water, where they sat for a
moment very still, heads up, and ready. If there was any signal given
I did not hear it. At the same moment each pair of wings struck the
water with a sharp splash, and they shot straight up in that
remarkable way of theirs, as if thrown by a strong spring. An instant
they seemed to hang motionless in the air high above the water, then
they turned and disappeared swiftly over the eastern hill toward the
marshes.

V. AN ORIOLE'S NEST.

[Illustration]

How suggestive it is, swinging there through sunlight and shadow from
the long drooping tips of the old elm boughs! And what a delightful
cradle for the young orioles, swayed all day long by every breath of
the summer breeze, peeping through chinks as the world sweeps by,
watching with bright eyes the boy below who looks up in vain, or the
mountain of hay that brushes them in passing, and whistling cheerily,
blow high or low, with never a fear of falling! The mother bird must
feel very comfortable about it as she goes off caterpillar hunting,
for no bird enemy can trouble the little ones while she is gone. The
black snake, that horror of all low-nesting birds, will never climb so
high. The red squirrel--little wretch that he is, to eat young birds
when he has still a bushel of corn and nuts in his old wall--cannot
find a footing on those delicate branches. Neither can the crow find a
resting place from which to steal the young; and the hawk's legs are
not long enough to reach down and grasp them, should he perchance
venture near the house and hover an instant over the nest.

Besides all this, the oriole is a neighborly little body; and that
helps her. Though the young are kept from harm anywhere by the cunning
instinct which builds a hanging nest, she st