26 B Y- WA YS AND BIRD-NO TES. 



should have to wait and watch , but first I sat- 

 isfied myself by a simple method that my 

 watching would probably not be in vain. A 

 little examination of the ground at the base of 

 the stump showed me a quantity of fresh wood- 

 fragments, not unlike very coarse saw-dust 

 scattered over the surface. This assured me 

 that one of the excavations above was a new 

 one, and that a nest was either building or had 

 been finished but a short while. So I hastily 

 hid myself on a log in a clump of bushes, dis- 

 tant from the stump about fifty feet, whence I 

 could plainly see the holes. 



One who has never been out alone in a 

 Southern swamp can have no fair understand- 

 ing of its loneliness, solemnity and funereal 

 sadness of effect. Even in the first gush of 

 Spring it was now about the sixth of April 

 I felt the weight of something like eternity in 

 the air not the eternity of the future but the 

 eternity of the past. Everything around me 

 appeared old, sleepy, and musty, despite the 

 fresh buds, tassels, and flower-spikes. What 

 can express dreariness so effectually as the 

 long moss of those damp woods ? I imagined 

 that the few little birds I saw flitting here and 

 there in the tree tops were not so noisy and 

 joyous as they would be when, a month later, 

 their northward migration should bring them 

 into our greening northern woods. As the 

 sun mounted, however, a cheerful twitter ran 

 with the gentle breeze through the bay thickets 

 and magnolia clumps, and I recognized a 

 number of familiar voices ; then suddenly the 

 gavel of Campephilus sounded sharp and 

 strong a quarter-mile away. A few measured 

 raps, followed by a rattling drum-call, a space 



