12 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 



to my ear more melodious than his caw of a clear winter 

 morning as it drops to you filtered through five hundred 

 fathoms of crisp blue air. The hostility of all smaller birds 

 makes the moral character of the crow, for all his deaconlike 

 demeanour and garb, somewhat questionable. He could 

 never sally forth without insult. The golden robins, espe 

 cially, would chase him as far as I could follow with my 

 eye, making him duck clumsily to avoid their importunate 

 bills. I do not believe, however, that he robbed any nests 

 hereabouts, for the refuse of the gas-works, which, in our 

 free-and-easy community, is allowed to poison the river, 

 supplied him with dead alewives in abundance. I used to 

 watch him making his periodical visits to the salt-marshes 

 and coming back with a fish in his beak to his young 

 savages, who, no doubt, like it in that condition which 

 makes it savoury to the Kanakas and other corvine races of 

 men. 



Orioles are in great plenty with me. I have seen seven 

 males flashing about the garden at once. A merry crew of 

 them swing their hammocks from the pendulous boughs. 

 During one of these latter years, when the canker-worms 

 stripped our elms as bare as winter, these birds went to the 

 trouble of rebuilding their unroofed nests, and chose for the 

 purpose trees which are safe from those swarming vandals, 

 such as the ash and the button-wood. One year a pair (dis 

 turbed, I suppose, elsewhere) built a second nest in an elm, 

 within a few yards of the house. My friend, Edward E. 

 Hale, told me once that the oriole rejected from his web all 

 strands of brilliant colour, and I thought it a striking example 

 of that instinct of concealment noticeable in many birds, 

 though it should seem in this instance that the nest was 

 amply protected by its position from all marauders but owls 

 and squirrels. Last year, however, I had the fullest proof 

 that Mr. Hale was mistaken. A pair of orioles built on the 

 lowest trailer of a weeping elm, which hung within ten feet of 

 our drawing-room window, and so low that I could reach it 

 from the ground. The nest was wholly woven and felted 

 with ravellings of woollen carpet in which scarlet predomi 

 nated. Would the same thing have happened in the woods ? 

 Or did the nearness of a human dwelling perhaps give the 

 birds a greater feeling of security? They are very bold, by 

 the way, in quest of cordage, and I have often watched them 



