24 HAMPSHIRE DAYS 



I may add that in May 1901 a pair of robins built 

 on the bank close to where the nest had been made 

 the previous year, and that in this nest a cuckoo was 

 also reared. The bird, when first seen, was apparently 

 about four or five days old, and it had the nest to 

 itself. Three ejected robin's eggs were lying on the 

 bank a little lower down. 



It is hardly to be doubted that the robins were 

 the same birds that had reared the cuckoo in the 

 previous season; and it is highly probable that the 

 same cuckoo had returned to place her egg in their 

 nest. 



The end of the little history the fate of the ejected 

 nestling and the attitude of the parent robins remains 

 to be told. When the young cuckoo throws out the 

 nestlings from nests in trees, hedges, bushes, and 

 reeds, the victims, as a rule, fall some distance to the 

 ground, or in the water, and are no more seen by the 

 old birds. Here the young robin, when ejected, fell 

 a distance of but five or six inches, and rested on a 

 broad, bright green leaf, where it was an exceedingly 

 conspicuous object ; and when the mother robin was 

 on the nest and at this stage she was on it a 

 greater part of the time warming that black-skinned, 

 toad -like, spurious babe of hers, her bright, intelli- 

 -gent eyes were looking full at the other one, just 

 beneath her, which she had grown in her body and had 

 hatched with her warmth, and was her very own. I 

 watched her for hours ; watched her when warming 

 the cuckoo, when she left the nest and when she 



