112 NATURE-STUDY REVIEW 



Just as I was beginning to multiply sixty-five by fourteen, and 

 to think that even that would not be a sufficient number of worms 

 for a two weeks' supply, a happy idea came to me. Why 

 not give the birds the yolk of a haid-boiled egg? I tried this and 

 it worked well. After the birds swallowed the yolk, I dropped 

 some water down their throats by means of an old eye-dropper. 

 The robins seemed to thrive on this so that from this time only 

 an occasional worm was given them. Also strawberries were 

 not scorned; and once I fed them on mashed potatoes, but on 

 the whole, I tried to keep their diet as true to robin nature as I 

 could. 



The robins had plenty of admirers. When the basket was 

 being cleaned, I let the children hold the birds for a 

 few moments. I believe it does a person good to hold a robin, 

 or a frog, or a bunch of flowers, or a garter snake in his hands. 

 And as the children held the robins, and remarked about their 

 speckled breasts, they learned that a very very long time ago, 

 the ancestors of the robins all had speckled bi easts when they were 

 full grown, but now only the baby robins have speckled breasts, 

 which disappear when they grow up. The children also discovered 

 just how many toes a robin has and why it is easy for him to 

 get worms. Many guesses were made as to what became of the 

 parents, and the children waxed sympathetic as they conjectured 

 the fate of the old birds. 



As days went by, moie feathers grew on my foster children. 

 At the end of the twelfth day, I noticed an unusual amount of 

 stretching in the basket. The robins perhaps were beginning to 

 feel that the chief aim in life is rot to sit in a basket and be fed. 

 Just fourteen days after I took them from the nest, I heard the 

 robins fluttering in the covered basket. I knew that the time had 

 come to let them go. I was loath to part with them, however, 

 and kept them in the covered basket until next morning. Then 

 on the seventeenth day of May, I took the basket out into the 

 yaid and lifting the cover let the robins go. They flew as though 

 they had been flying for years. 



The children of the neighborhood are still very much interested, 

 and every time they see a young robin, they think that perhaps 

 it is one of "our robins." 



