CHAPTER XVI 



BIRDS' COURTSHIP AND MARRIAGE 



Some cynic has said that matrimony among up- 

 to-date people is a necessary preliminary to ali- 

 mony. This cannot be true of our bird neigh- 

 bors, but they have their preliminaries also, and 

 some of them more or less exciting and even 

 weird. 



Generally speaking, we know so little of birds 

 that it may seem a good deal like presumption to 

 write of their personal and most intimate rela- 

 tions. Still we know more of the courtship of 

 some birds than that of the soldier and his girl 

 clinging together on the street, and more of their 

 marital woes than we know of the unhappy tri- 

 angles of the divorce courts. Man "the roof 

 and crown of things" a little lower than the 

 angels, stuff and nonsense, is not to be compared, 

 in devotion and constancy, with his bird neighbors. 

 The stones that have been thrown at birds, since 

 time began, had better have been thrown at man 

 if he, in his smug superiority, were capable of tak- 

 ing a rebuke. 



'93 



