14 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 



refuse of the gas-works, which, in our free-and-easy com 

 munity, 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 ra veilings of woollen carpet in which scarlet 

 predominated. 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 stripping the fibrous bark from a honey 

 suckle growing over the very door. But, indeed, all my 

 birds look upon me as if I were a mere tenant at will, and 

 they were landlords. &quot;With shame I confess it, I have been 

 bullied even by a humming-bird. This spring, as I was 

 cleansing a pear-tree of its lichens, one of these zigzagging 



