Mistress Cuckoo 
possibly chill the life out of their prospective 
brothers and sisters. In such extremity she 
may well vote family life a failure. Do what 
she will, it may cause some of the brood to 
perish ; and even if she succeeds in making the 
two ends meet, she is all the time in a desper- 
ate anxiety. As the historian would say, this 
is no fancy sketch. Nests are sometimes found 
with birdlings in different stages of develop- 
ment, and eggs still unhatched. 
Placed in such a predicament, who can blame 
Mistress Cuckoo for retaliating on Nature, as 
it were, and offsetting one abnormality by 
another? Still, the American species are not 
commonly deterred from maintaining the house- 
hold, and they cherish their offspring with the 
same affection that other birds display. But 
we can hardly wonder if, with the memory of 
previous disastrous experience, they now and 
then seek a happy issue out of all their troubles 
by passing over an egg or two to the charitable 
offices of another bird. 
Moreover, as regards the fault of eating eggs 
in others’ nests, the discredit of American 
cuckoos is quite out of proportion to their 
offence. It is chiefly the prevalence of the un- 
natural habit in European species that has, as 
107 
