PHASES OF BIRD LIFE. 181 
in my neighborhood, both summer and winter; but 
my quest was rewarded in two instances during the 
spring of 1893, —the first nest being in the top of 
a truncated sassafras-tree. The snag was perhaps 
twenty feet high. On one of my visits the birds 
were hollowing out their little apartment. They 
would dart into the narrow opening, and presently 
emerge, Carrying small fragments of partly decayed 
wood in their beaks and dropping them to the 
ground. Some weeks later, I climbed the tree (with 
much fear and trembling, be it said), but the birds 
had made the cavity so deep that I could not see 
the bottom, and break open their sylvan nursery I 
would not. The second titmouse nest was in a 
very slender branch of a sassafras-tree, —so slender, 
indeed, that it was a wonder the birds were able to 
make a hollow in it. At first it looked precisely 
like a black patch burned on the bough’s surface. 
When one of the feathered atoms stood in the tiny 
doorway and looked out, she made a pretty picture, 
—one that would have put a throb of joy into an 
artist’s bosom. 
Yet there is another picture that I should prefer 
to have painted, not on account of its attractiveness, 
but on account of its quaintness; it was the nest, 
eggs, and young of a pair of green herons in an 
orchard. ‘The nest was built high in an apple-tree, 
and was only a loose platform of sticks. Although 
anything but an expert climber, I contrived to scale 
that tree three times to satisfy my curiosity. The 
first time there were four eggs of a greenish-blue 
