49 FRIENDS WORTH KNOWING. 
garden, however. You may find him everywhere in the 
woods, and few species are equal to this in the number of 
individuals. An old stump that is tog soft for the wood- 
peckers, or the hollow, broken limb of a tree that the winds 
have demolished, is his chosen home. Into a hole some- 
where he stuffs a large quantity of twigs, some of them of 
astonishing size when we think how small a bird handles 
them. In the centre of this mass is a soft chamber, where- 
in six or seven brick-dust-colored eggs are hatched late in 
May. It is a nest which justifies his generic name, 770g- 
lodytes, and so fond of his queer den is he, and so restlessly 
active, that when his proper home is finished, he packs full 
of rubbish half the crevices in the vicinity, out of a sheer 
want of some better way to occupy his time and ease his 
energy. 
There is one component of this nest which is also used 
by the vireos and gnatcatchers—namely, round pellets of a 
white cottony substance, the nature of which I was puzzled 
to determine. At last I caught the birds collecting it, and 
found it to be a minute fungus which covers dead twigs 
here and there with a living velvet of snowy white. It is 
elastic and somewhat viscous, and with gossamer serves an 
obvious purpose in such a nest as the vireo’s; but why the 
wrens scatter it through their brush-pile is not so clear. 
