ental kind of fashion. Follow the tunnels of
the ants or the crickets, or of the moles and the weasels,
underground, or the courses of the streams or the paths of the animals
above ground--how they turn and hesitate, how wayward and undecided
they are! A right line seems out of the question.

The oriole often weaves strings into her nest; sometimes she binds and
overhands the part of the rim where she alights in going in, to make
it stronger, but it is always done in a hit-or-miss, childish sort of
way, as one would expect it to be; the strings are massed, or snarled,
or left dangling at loose ends, or are caught around branches; the
weaving and the sewing are effective, and the whole nest is a marvel
of blind skill, of untaught intelligence; yet how unmethodical, how
delightfully irregular, how unmistakably a piece of wild nature!

Sometimes the instinct of the bird is tardy, and the egg of the bird
gets ripe before the nest is ready; in such a case the egg is of
course lost. I once found the nest of the black and white creeping
warbler in a mossy bank in the woods, and under the nest was an egg of
the bird. The warbler had excavated the site for her nest, dropped her
egg into it, and then gone on with her building. Instinct is not
always inerrant. Nature is wasteful, and plays the game with a free
hand. Yet what she loses on one side she gains on another; she is like
that least bittern Mr. Frank M. Chapman tells about. Two of the
bittern's five eggs had been punctured by the long-billed marsh wren.
When the bird returned to her nest and found the two eggs punctured,
she made no outcry, showed no emotion, but deliberately proceeded to
eat them. Having done this, she dropped the empty shells over the side
of the nest, together with any straws that had become soiled in the
process, cleaned her bill, and proceeded with her incubation. This was
Nature in a nut-shell,--or rather egg-shell,--turning her mishaps to
some good account. If the egg will not make a bird, it will make food;
if not food, then fertilizer.

Among nearly all our birds, the female is the active business member
of the partnership; she has a turn for practical affairs; she chooses
the site of the nest, and usually builds it unaided. The life of the
male is more or less a holiday or picnic till the young are hatched,
when his real cares begin, for he does his part in feeding them. One
may see the male cedar-bird attending the female as she is busy with