ood day for the swallows, a good day for
the haymakers, and a good day for him who sits before his open barn door
and weaves his facts and midsummer fancies into this slight literary
fabric.

VI

NEAR VIEWS OF WILD LIFE

The wild life around us is usually so unobtrusive and goes its own way
so quietly and furtively that we miss much of it unless we cultivate an
interest in it. A person must be interested in it, to paraphrase a line
of Wordsworth's, ere to him it will seem worthy of his interest. One
thing is linked to another or gives a clue to another. There is no surer
way to find birds' nests than to go berrying or fishing. In the
blackberry or raspberry bushes you may find the bush sparrow's nest or
the indigobird's nest. Once while fishing a trout-stream I missed my
fish, and my hook caught on a branch over my head. When I pulled the
branch down, there, deftly saddled upon it, was a hummingbird's nest. I
unwittingly caught more than I missed. On another occasion I stumbled
upon the nest of the water accentor which I had never before found; on
still another, upon the nest of the winter wren, a marvel of mossy
softness and delicacy hidden under a mossy log.

Along trout-streams with overhanging or shelving ledges the fisherman
often sees the nest of the phoebe-bird, which does not cease to please
for the hundredth time, because of its fitness and exquisite artistry.
On the newly sawn timbers of your porch or woodshed it is far less
pleasing, because the bird's art, born of rocky ledges, only serves in
the new environment to make its nest conspicuous.

Sitting in my barn-door study I see a vesper sparrow fly up and alight
on the telephone wire with nesting-material in her beak. I keep my eye
upon her. In a moment she drops down to the grassy and weedy bank of the
roadside in front of me and disappears. A few moments later I have her
secret--a nest in a little recess in the bank. That straw gave the
finishing touch. She kept her place on the nest until she had deposited
her first egg on June 24th, probably for her second brood this season.
Some young vespers flitting about farther up the road are presumably her
first brood. Each day thereafter for four consecutive days she added an
egg. Incubation soon began and on the 10th of July the young were out,
the little sprawling, skinny things looking, as a city girl said when
she first beheld newly-hatched birds in a nest, as if they were
mildewed.

These gro