8 A RED-HEADED FAMILY. 



followed by a great red-crested head turned 

 sidewise so as to let fall upon me the glint of 

 an iris unequalled by that of any other bird in 

 the world. He had gone out early. I should 

 have to wait and watch; but first I satisfied 

 myself by a simple method that my watching 

 would probably not be in vain. A little exam- 

 ination 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, distant 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 num- 



