her merciless
ubiquity is astonishing. It occasionally happens that almost every nest
I meet in a day's walk will show the ominous speckled egg. In a single
stroll in the country I have removed eight of these foreboding tokens of
misery. Only last summer I discovered the nest of a wood-sparrow in a
hazel-bush, my attention being attracted thither by the parent bird
bearing food in her beak. I found the nest occupied, appropriated,
monopolized, by a cow-bird fledgling--a great, fat, clamoring lubber,
completely filling the cavity of the nest, the one diminutive, puny
remnant of the sparrow's offspring being jammed against the side of the
nest, and a skeleton of a previous victim hanging among the branches
below, with doubtless others lost in the grass somewhere in the near
neighborhood, where they had been removed by the bereaved mother. The
ravenous young parasite, though not half grown, was yet bigger by
nearly double than the foster-mother. What a monster this! The "Black
Douglass" of the bird home; a blot on Nature's page!

As in previous instances, observing that the interloper had a voice
fully capable of making his wants known, I gave the comfortable little
beast ample room to spread himself on the ground, and let the lone
little starveling survivor of the rightful brood have his cot all to
himself.

And yet, as I left the spot, I confess to a certain misgiving, as the
pleading chirrup of the ousted fledgling followed me faintly and more
faintly up the hill, recalling, too, the many previous similar acts of
mine--and one in particular, when I had slaughtered in cold blood two of
these irresponsibles found in a single nest. But sober second thought
evoked a more philosophic and conscientious mood, the outcome of which
leading, as always, to a semi-conviction that the complex question of
reconciliation of duty and humanity in the premises was not thus easily
disposed of, considering, as I was bound to do, the equal innocence of
the chicks, both of which had been placed in the nest in obedience to a
natural law, which in the case of the cow-bird was none the less a
divine institution because I failed to understand it. Such is the
inevitable, somewhat penitent conclusion which I always arrive at on the
cow-bird question; and yet my next cow-bird fledgling will doubtless
follow the fate of all its predecessors, the reminiscent qualms of
conscience finding a ready philosophy equal to the emergency; for if,
indeed, th