RING DOVE. 251 



loves. In courtsliip they salute with their bills, and mur- 

 mur, or coo, their notes of pleasure. The male and female 

 sit by turns while hatching, and alternately feed their young. 

 They are not the birds of a busy and turbulent world, they 

 have no gall-bladder, and, therefore, the secretions of the 

 liver are, it is supposed, never converted into black bile : a 

 fluid which has, in all ages, been associated with the irritable 

 passions of manldnd. Doves were sacred among the priests 

 of antiquity. They drew the car of the celestial Venus, and 

 were the messengers of the will of the gods. It was a Dove 

 (ever since sacred to peace) that brought the olive branch 

 to the ark of Noah, for which she has her place among the 

 constellations ; and the Christian world still personate the 

 Holy Spirit under the mystic emblem of a Dove." * 



The notes of this Dove may be heard almost incessantly 

 through the months of March and April in most of our 

 thick woods and plantations, particularly those of closely set 

 firs, in which they delight to build ; the nest consists of a 

 few sticks laid across, constituting a platform surface, but so 

 thin in substance that the eggs or young may sometimes be 

 distinguished. This structure is usually sixteen or twenty 

 feet above the ground, and sufficiently broad to afford room 

 for both parents and their young. Two eggs are laid, which 

 are oval and white, measuring one inch eight lines in length, 

 by one inch two lines in breadth ; these are hatched in six- 

 teen or seventeen days ; the young are supplied wdth food 

 reproduced from the crops of the parent birds, who, insert- 

 ing their own beak between the mandibles of the young bird, 

 thus feed them with a soft and pulpy mass which is already 

 half digested. The old birds produce tw^o and sometimes 

 three broods in the season ; and it is a practice among boys, 

 in some countries, when they find a pair of newly hatched 

 birds, too young and small for a prize, to tie each bird by 

 one leg to a branch under the nest, passing the string through 

 * See also page 258. 



