92 THE STORY OF THE BIRDS. 
The new wife or husband has the very commend- 
able virtue of taking up the work where the “dear 
departed ” left it off—anywhere from the earliest 
stages of nest building to the feeding of the young. 
It would seem that the new bird would like to begin 
anew, but in this and other respects it seems a model 
step-parent. 
If the male is left he at once begins to sing or call. 
This may appear as a wail for his first love, but it 
looks later wonderfully like a serenade to his second. 
Some persons have been cruel enough to shoot female 
nightingales on the nest, that the male may break 
again into song. 
The purpose of this song is more certainly indi- 
cated in those cases where females sing in widow- 
hood which are usually nonmusical at other times. 
Others who can not sing have peculiar widowhood 
cries that are well understood by the gallants. But 
since others of them have neither of these means of 
announcement, and can not don the draperies and 
colors of mourning as a visual advertisement, and 
dress better in their bereavement than they did in 
their first partner’s lifetime, it is difficult to see how 
they so quickly marry again. There may, therefore, 
be a large number of unmated birds, among which 
the widow “has her eye out,” and whose whereabouts 
she well knows. 
Sometimes they may be persistently near. In the 
author’s yard there has nested for years a pair of 
house wrens, presumably the same birds. One sea- 
son they were annoyed (or rather the husband was) 
