er young up out of that well and down to the ground? We watched,
hoping to see her in the act. But we did not. She may have done it at
night or very early in the morning. All we know is that when Amasa one
morning passed that way, there sat eleven little tufts of black and
yellow down in the spring, with the mother duck near by. It was a
pretty sight. The feat of getting down from the tree-top cradle had
been safely effected, probably by the young clambering up on the
inside walls of the cavity and then tumbling out into the air and
coming down gently like huge snowflakes. They are mostly down, and why
should they not fall without any danger to life or limb? The notion
that the mother duck takes the young one by one in her beak and
carries them to the creek is doubtless erroneous. Mr. William Brewster
once saw the golden-eye, whose habits of nesting are like those of the
wood duck, get its young from the nest to the water in this manner:
The mother bird alighted in the water under the nest, looked all
around to see that the coast was clear, and then gave a peculiar call.
Instantly the young shot out of the cavity that held them, as if the
tree had taken an emetic, and came softly down to the water beside
their mother. Another observer assures me that he once found a newly
hatched duckling hung by the neck in the fork of a bush under a tree
in which a brood of Wood ducks had been hatched.

The ways of nature,--who can map them, or fathom them, or interpret
them, or do much more than read a hint correctly here and there? Of
one thing we may be pretty certain, namely, that the ways of wild
nature may be studied in our human ways, inasmuch as the latter are an
evolution from the former, till we come to the ethical code, to
altruism and self-sacrifice. Here we seem to breathe another air,
though probably this code differs no more from the animal standards of
conduct than our physical atmosphere differs from that of early
geologic time.

Our moral code must in some way have been evolved from our rude animal
instincts. It came from within; its possibilities were all in nature.
If not, where were they?

I have seen disinterested acts among the birds, or what looked like
such, as when one bird feeds the young of another species when it
hears them crying for food. But that a bird would feed a grown bird of
another species, or even of its own, to keep it from starving, I have
my doubts. I am quite positive that mice will try to