BIRD CURIOS. 27 
number of species of birds. But the snow-storms 
and fierce northern blasts that came later were very 
hard on both birds and buds. Many a chorus was 
sung during the pleasant weather, but on more than 
one day afterward the cheerful voices of the feathered 
choir were hushed, while the songsters themselves 
sought refuge from the storm in every available 
nook, where they sat shivering. One cannot always 
repress the interrogatory why Nature so frequently 
stirs hopes only to blast them; but it is not the 
business of the empirical observer to question her 
motives or her manners, —rather to study her as 
she is, without asking why. 
Cold as April was, some birds were hardy enough 
to go to nest-building. Among these were the robins, 
whose blushing bosoms could be seen everywhere in 
grove and field. On the seventh of the month a 
robin was carrying grass fibres to a half-finished nest 
in the woodland near my house. A week later she 
was sitting on the nest, hugging her eggs close 
beneath her warm bosom, while the tempests howled 
mercilessly about her roofless homestead. It seemed 
to me, one cold morning after a snow-storm, that her 
body shivered as she sat there, and I feared more 
than once that she would freeze to death; but no 
such fatality befell her, and she resolutely kept her 
seat in her adobe cottage. 
And this reminds me of a bird tragedy described 
to me by a professor in the college located in my 
town. He said that a number of years ago a robin 
built a nest in a tree not far from the site on which 
