Lake George 
the whippoorwill is really as innocent and light- 
hearted as any wren or purple finch. 
A novel experience with a pair of phoebes, 
thissummer, put me into possession of a beauti- 
ful nest and a full set of eggs, without robbery, 
and without the bird’s abandonment of the nest. 
On the piazza of a neighboring house several 
pairs of birds were nesting; and my humble 
stores of learning were appealed to, for deter- 
mining the species. As the uninitiated observ- 
er’s method of describing a bird is marvellously 
vague, and commonly leaves the ornithologist 
quite as much in the dark as ever—as in the 
case of an enthusiastic student who told me of 
an unfamiliar bird he saw, with a double fail, 
by which I afterward inferred he meant a forked 
tail—I could only say that the indefinite data 
furnished would cover a multitude of species, 
and be equally applicable to swallows, catbirds, 
and other small varieties of dark complexion. 
This only illustrates how indistinct one’s per- 
ception of an object usually is, until he has 
learned the art of clear discernment. Visiting 
the house, I found, on the beam under the 
piazza eaves, three nests of the same kind, at in- 
tervals of about three feet from each other, and 
proving to be phoebes’s nests. One contained 
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