December 
fashioned into the form of a cocoanut. A small 
hole is left two-thirds up for entrance’’ (an- 
other writer says the front door always faces 
the south), ‘‘ the upper edge of which projects 
like a pent-house over the lower to prevent the 
admission of rain. ‘The inside is lined with 
fine, soft grass, and sometimes feathers, and the 
outside, when hardened by the sun, resists 
every kind of weather. ‘This nest is generally 
suspended among the reeds, above the reach of 
the highest tides, and is tied so fast to every 
part of the surrounding reeds as to bid defiance 
to the winds and the waves.”’ 
The nest of the cliff swallow, which is fash- 
ioned into the shape of a gourd, is construct- 
ed on the exterior entirely of pellets of mud 
(bricks without straw), the interior softly lined, 
and the whole attached by its larger part to 
a building or cliff. Among all the designs of 
nests, in this country at least, there is noth- 
ing more picturesque than the deep, pendu- 
lous structure of the Baltimore oriole, hanging 
from near the extremity of a drooping branch 
of an elm-tree, nearly seven inches in depth, 
of cylindrical shape, the outer part a sort of 
coarsely woven cloth made of thread, sewing- 
silk, ravellings of any kind, strings of the flax 
a7 
