marvellous flight
motions. Is it not likely that the Teleosaurs who watched hungrily from
the swamps saw them disappear at last in a hollowed cavity beneath a
rotten knothole? Here, perhaps, the soft-shelled, lizard-like eggs were
laid, and when they gave forth the ugly creaturelings did not Father
Creature flop to the topmost branch and utter a gurgling cough, a most
unpleasant grating sound, but grand in its significance, as the opening
chord in the symphony of the ages to follow?--until now the mockingbird
and the nightingale hold us spellbound by the wonder of their minstrelsy.

Turning from our imaginary picture of the ancient days, we find that some
of the birds of the present time have found a primitive way of nesting
still the best. If we push over this rotten stump we shall find that the
cavity near the top, where the wood is still sound, has been used the past
summer by the downy woodpecker--a front door like an auger hole, ceiling
of rough-hewn wood, a bed of chips!

The chickadee goes a step further, and shows his cleverness in sometimes
choosing a cavity already made, and instead of rough, bare chips, the six
or eight chickadee youngsters are happy on a hair mattress of a closely
woven felt-like substance.

Perhaps we should consider the kingfisher the most barbarous of all the
birds which form a shelter for their home. With bill for pick and shovel,
she bores straight into a sheer clay bank, and at the end of a six-foot
tunnel her young are reared, their nest a mass of fish bones--the residue
of their dinners. Then there are the aerial masons and brickmakers--the
eave swallows, who carry earth up into the air, bit by bit, and attach it
to the eaves, forming it into a globular, long-necked flask. The barn
swallows mix the clay with straw and feathers and so form very firm
structures on the rafters above the haymows.

But what of the many nests of grasses and twigs which we find in the
woods? How closely they were concealed while the leaves were on the trees,
and how firm and strong they were while in use, the strongest wind and
rain of summer only rocking them to and fro! But now we must waste no time
or they will disappear. In a month or more almost all will have dissolved
into fragments and fallen to earth--their mission accomplished.

Some look as if disintegration had already begun, but if we had discovered
them earlier in the year, we should have seen that they were never less
fragile or loosely co