42 FRIENDS WORTH KNOWING. 



garden, however. You may find him everywhere in the 

 woods, and few species are equal to this in the number of 

 individuals. An old stump that is too soft for the wood- 

 peckers, or the hollow, broken limb of a tree that the winds 

 have demolished, is his chosen home. Into a hole some- 

 where he stuffs a large quantity of twigs, some of them of 

 astonishing size when w r e think how small a bird handles 

 them. In tlie centre of this mass is a soft chamber, where- 

 in six or seven brick-dust-colored eggs are hatched late in 

 May. It is a nest which justifies his generic name, Trog- 

 lodytes, and so fond of his queer den is he, and so restlessly 

 active, that when his proper home is finished, he packs full 

 of rubbish half the crevices in the vicinity, out of a sheer 

 want of some better way to occupy his time arid ease his 

 energy. 



There is one component of this nest which is also used 

 by the vireos and gnatcatchers namely, round pellets of a 

 white cottony substance, the nature of which I was puzzled 

 to determine. At last I caught the birds collecting it, and 

 found it to be a minute fungus which covers dead twigs 

 here and there with a living velvet of snowy white. It is 

 elastic and somewhat viscous, and with gossamer serves an 

 obvious purpose in such a nest as the vireo's ; but why the 

 wrens scatter it through their brush-pile is not so clear. 



