. Burroughs has said of the
wren that it "will build in anything that has a hole in it, from an old
boot to a bombshell." In similar whim our little solitary hornet has
been known to favor nail-holes, hollow reeds, straws, the barrels of a
pistol, holes in kegs, worm-holes in wood, and spools, to which we may
now add bamboo brushes.

[Illustration]

Ovid declared and the ancient Greeks believed that hornets were the
direct progeny of the snorting war-horse. The phrase "mad as a hornet"
has become a proverb. Think, then, of a brush loaded and tipped with
this martial spirit of Vespa, this cavorting afflatus, this testy
animus! There is more than one pessimistic "goose-quill," of course,
"mightier than the sword," which, it occurs to me in my now charitable
mood, might have been thus surreptitiously voudooed by the war-like
hornet, and the plug never removed.

THE CUCKOOS & THE OUTWITTED COW-BIRD

[Illustration]

How has that "blessed bird" and "sweet messenger of spring," the
"cuckoo," imposed upon the poetic sensibilities of its native land!

And what _is_ this cuckoo which has thus bewitched all the poets? What
is the personality behind that "wandering voice?" What the
distinguishing trait which has made this wily attendant on the spring
notorious from the times of Aristotle and Pliny? Think of "following the
cuckoo," as Logan longed to do, in its "annual visit around the globe,"
a voluntary witness and accessory to the blighting curse of its vagrant,
almost unnatural life! No, my indiscriminate bards; on this occasion we
must part company. I cannot "follow" your cuckoo--except with a gun,
forsooth--nor welcome your "darling of the spring," even though he were
never so captivating as a songster.

[Illustration]

The song and the singer are here identical and inseparable, to my
prosaic and rational senses; for does not that "blithe new-comer," as
Tennyson says, "tell his name to all the hills"--"_Cuck_oo! _Cuck_oo!"

The poet of romance is prompted to draw on his imagination for his
facts, but the poet of nature must first of all be true, and
incidentally as beautiful and good as may be; and a half-truth or a
truth with a reservation may be as dangerous as falsehood. The poet who
should so paint the velvety beauty of a rattlesnake as to make you long
to coddle it would hardly be considered a safe character to be at large.
Likewise an ode to the nettle, or to the autumn splendor of the
poison-sumac, w