78 BRITISH BIRDS, THEIR EGGS AND NESTS. 
birds,—frequent in all these sites, it seem dificult to say where it 
may not be found. Often, too, it becomes a mass of straw and 
dry grass and lavish feather-lining, big enough to fill a man’s hat 
of large size. The eggs are very various in the intensity of their 
‘surface markings. They are white, speckled and spotted and. 
streaked with ash colour and dusky brown, some so slighty as to 
be pale grey, others so profusely as to be very dark “ pepper and 
salt.” They vary in number from four to six. Whenever the nest 
is built in a situation naturally open at top, it is domed over by 
the little constructor.—f77. 7, plate IV. 
101. GREENFINCH—(Coccothraustes chloris). 
Green Grosbeak, Green Linnet, Green Bird.—A sufficiently 
common species, and often seen in winter, in stubbles which afford 
a sufficiency of the seed-constituents of its food, in large flocks. 
Neither does it yield an insignificant portion of the egg spoils of 
the country-boy. The nest is usually built in a hedge, and it 
dearly loves a thick massive thorn hedge for the purpose. In one 
such, bordering an orchard in Essex, of perhaps seventy or eighty 
yards long, I found one day a dozen or more of Greenfinches’ 
nests, almost all with eggs in. It is, however, not seldom to be 
met with in an evergreen or other bush in tne garden; sometimes 
in a fir tree, and again in a fruit or ornamental tree. The 
materials employed are roots, moss, grass, with a lining of the 
same, only finer, and plentiful hair. I have often noticed the 
presence of a kind of scrubby scales about the interior of one of their 
nests. The eggs are four, five, or six in number, and vary much 
in size and but little in general appearance. They are white, 
suffused with a bluish tinge, and with reddish or purple spots and 
streaks, intermingled with some of a darker shade.—Fig. 8, plate 
IP, 
SS 
