A Street Troubadour 



peace in that bird-box, so they abandoned it, 

 feathers and all ; and Biddy, whose ideas were 

 distinctly original, selected the site this time, 

 nothing less than the top of an electric lamp in 

 the middle of Madison Square. All week they 

 labored, and in spite of a high wind most of 

 the time, they finished the nest. It is hard to 

 see how the Birds could sleep at night with that 

 great glaring buzzing light under their noses. 

 Still, Biddy seemed pleased, Randy was learn- 

 ing to suppress his own opinion, and all would 

 have gone well but that before the first egg was 

 laid the carbon-points of the light burned out, 

 and the man who put in the new ones thought 

 proper to consign remorselessly the whole of the 

 Biddy-Randy mansion to the garbage-can. A 

 Robin or a Swallow might have felt this a crush- 

 ing blow, but there is no limit to a Sparrow's 

 energy and hopefulness. Evidently it was the 

 wrong kind of a nest. Probably the material 

 was at fault. At any rate, a radical change 

 would be much better. After embezzling some 

 long straws from the nest of an absent neigh- 

 bor, Biddy laid them in the high fork of an elm- 

 tree in Madison Square Park, by way of letting 



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