ne would come out of the ground to make a start, any more
than a mouse could be found bold enough to put the bell on the cat's
neck as told in the old fable, the grubs stopped there year after year,
and had a very, very hard time of it. It was a regular feast-land for
the birds; there were no such buds anywhere else to peck at, for so the
tomtits and bullfinches thought; no such strawberries for the blackbirds
and thrushes; and as to the elder-berries down by the pond, the
starlings used to come in flocks to strip them off, and then carelessly
leave ever so many wasting upon the ground.

"Hooray!" said the birds that morning; and they sang and sang so loudly
and sweetly that the master of the garden opened his window and sat down
to listen to them. But they had something else to do besides sing;
there was courting, and wedding, and building, and housekeeping, going
on all over the garden. Mr and Mrs Redbreast were just married, and
shocking as it may seem, were quarrelling about the place where they
should live. Mr Robin wanted the snug quarters in the ivy, down by the
melon pits; while Mrs Redbreast said it was draughty, and made up her
mind to live in the rockery amongst the fern. Mr and Mrs Specklems,
the starlings, were very undecided about the hole in the chimney-stack,
so much so, that when they had half-furnished it, they altered their
minds and went to the great crack half way up the old cedar, and settled
there; "like a pair of giddy unsettled things," as the jackdaw said, who
meant to have been their neighbour; but was not above taking possession
of the soft bed they had left behind. As to Spottleover, he, too, was
out of temper all the rest of the day, and when Flutethroat met him in
the afternoon he found his neighbour all smeared with clay, and looking
for all the world like a clay-dabbing plasterer as he was.

"There, just look at those wretched little cocktail things," said
Flutethroat, pointing to the wrens, hard at work at their nest, just
when the cock bird flew up on to the wall, perked about for a moment,
sang his song in a tremendous hurry, and seemed to leave off in the
middle, as he popped down again to his work.

"Good job, too," said the thrush; "I wish mine was a cocktail, and then
I shouldn't have had these nobs of clay sticking to it;" saying which he
showed his neighbour three or four little clay-pellets attached to his
tail-feathers, evidently caught up when fetching his mortar from