


BIRD-NESTING IN WOODS AND HEDGEROWS. 
Let the reader imagine the verge of a young plantation of 
some thirty years’ growth, to which memory calls us back 
after more years than we like to think of. In this plantation, 
which had been planted by a retired physician, a keen botanist 
and a lover of science, the rarest trees known eighty years 
back were intermingled with the ash, the elm, the birch, and 
a sprinkling of spruce and other pine-trees. A limpid brook, 
just large enough to ornament the hanging woods and mingle 
its murmurings with the song of birds, traverses the wood in a 
meandering course for upwards of a mile, skirted by the once 
trim and still pleasant walk, although its gravel is now covered 
with weeds, and its shrubbery a tangled thicket; but all the 
better for its feathered inhabitants. Crossing the stile and 
penetrating the thicket, we are landed in a small triangular 
meadow, through which the brook meanders, after tumbling over 
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