nest before the sickle-bar had swept over it. It contained
four young ones just out of the shell. At my suggestion the mower
carefully placed it on the top of a stone wall. The parent birds were
not seen, but we naturally reasoned that they would come back and would
alight upon the wall to make observations.

But that afternoon and the next morning passed, and we saw no anxious
bird parents. The young lifted up their open mouths whenever I looked
into the nest and seemed to be more contented than abandoned birds
usually are. The next night was unseasonably cold, and I expected to
find the nestlings dead in the morning; but they were not, and,
strangely enough, for babes in the wood or rather on a stone wall, they
seemed to be doing well. Maybe the mother bird is still caring for them,
I said to myself, and I ambushed myself across the road opposite to them
and watched.

I had not long to wait. The mother sparrow came slyly up and dropped
some food into an open mouth and disappeared.

Who does not feel a thrill of pleasure when, in sauntering through the
woods, his hat just brushes a vireo's nest? This was my experience one
morning. The nest was like a natural growth, hanging there like a fairy
basket in the fork of a beech twig, woven of dry, delicate, papery,
brown and gray wood products, just high enough to escape prowling ground
enemies and low enough to escape sharp-eyed tree enemies. Its safety was
in its artless art. It was a part of the shadows and the green-and-brown
solitude. The weaver had bent down one of the green leaves and made it a
part of the nest; it was like the stroke of a great artist. Then the
dabs of white here and there, given by the fragments of spiders'
cocoons--all helped to blend it with the flickering light and shade.

I gently bent down the branch and four confident heads with open mouths
instantly appeared above the brim. The mother bird meanwhile was
flitting about in the branches overhead, peering down upon me and
uttering her anxious "quay quay," equivalent, I suppose, to saying: "Get
away!" This I soon did.

Most of our bird music, like our wild flowers, is soon quickly over. But
the red-eyed vireo sings on into September--not an ecstatic strain, but
a quiet, contented warble, like a boy whistling at his work.

VII

WITH ROOSEVELT AT PINE KNOT

It was in May during the last term of his Presidency that Roosevelt
asked me to go with him down to Pine Knot, Virginia, to hel