128 MY LADY IN GREEN. 



happened, she was frightened away l)y the peo- 

 ple about. 



Till her little ones were two weeks old, the 

 devoted if apparently ungentle parent continued 

 to feed them at intervals of thirty minutes, the 

 neck-dislocating performance being always as 

 violent as I have described. After that date she 

 came more frequently, every fifteen or twenty 

 minutes, and their development went on more 

 rapidly. At the early age of five and six days, 

 even before their eyes were open, the young 

 birds began to show that they had minds of their 

 own, and knew when they had enough (which 

 some folk bigger than birds never know) . When 

 one was sufficiently filled, or sufficiently racked, 

 it would shut its mouth and refuse to open, 

 though mamma touched it gently with her beak. 



" The world slipped away and I was in fairy- 

 land," wrote my old friend the Enthusiast, while 

 watching, in another part of the country that 

 same summer, the nest-building of a humming- 

 bird. To me, also, the study of the life and 

 afPairs of this nest, to which I gave nearly every 

 hour of daylight for weeks, seemed like a glimpse 

 into that land of childhood's dreams, except- 

 ing when the outer world obtruded too rudely. 

 For the life that went on under and around 

 that charmed spot was far from fairy-like. The 

 " hard facts " of human existence were ever 



