leaves for a nest, and were as snug as a bug in a rug. Downy drilled another 

 cell in a dead oak farther up the hill, and, I hope, passed the winter there 

 unmolested. Such little incidents, comic or tragic, as we happen to look at 

 them, are happening all about us, if we have eyes to see them. 



The next season, near sundown of a late November day, I saw Downy 

 trying to get possession of a hole not his own. I chanced to be passing under 

 a maple when white chips upon the ground again caused me to scrutinize the 

 branches overhead. Just then I saw Downy come to the tree, and, hopping 

 around on the under side of a large dry limb, begin to make passes at some- 

 thing with his beak. Presently I made out a round hole there, with some- 

 thing in it returning Downy's thrusts. The sparring continued some moments. 

 Downy would hop away a few feet, then return to the attack, each time to 

 be met by the occupant of the hole. I suspected an English sparrow had 

 taken possession of Downy's cell in his absence during the day, but I was 

 wrong. Downy flew to another branch, and I tossed up a stone against the 

 one that held the hole, when, with a sharp, steely note, out came a hairy 

 woodpecker and alighted on a near-by branch. Downy then had the "cheek" 

 to try to turn his large rival out of doors ; and it was Hairy's cell, too : one 

 could see that by the size of the entrance. Thus loosely does the rule of 

 meum and tuum obtain in the woods. There is no moral code in nature. 

 Might reads right. Man in communities has evolved ethical standards of con- 

 duct, but nations, in their dealings with one another, are still largely in a state 

 of savage nature, and seek to establish the right, as dogs do, by the appeal 

 to battle. 



One season a wood-duck laid her eggs in a cavity in the top of a tall 

 yellow birch near the spring that supplies my cabin with water. A bold 

 climber "shinned" up the fifty or sixty feet of rough tree-trunk and looked in 

 upon the eleven eggs. They were beyond the reach of his arm, in a well-like 

 cavity over three feet deep. How would she get her 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. 



Our moral code must m 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 will feed the young of another species when it hears it 

 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. — Atlantic 

 Monthly. 



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