108 EVERYDAY ADVENTURES 



The next day we were back in Philadelphia and 

 summer again, with a list of seventy-six different 

 kinds of birds identified on the trip and a total of 

 ten nests found. 



A few days later I went bird's-nesting with an- 

 other friend in the very heart of the city of Cam- 

 den. Through the manufacturing district a sluggish 

 creek winds its way past factory after factory. There, 

 under a clump of golden-rod leaves, he showed me 

 the nest of a spotted sandpiper, made of reeds lined 

 with grass, containing four eggs — dark-brown eggs, 

 spotted at the larger end with chocolate marks, and 

 coming to a sharp point at the other end. Later on, 

 I found another nest in the middle of a mass of 

 horse-tail. Then, in the very centre of a base-ball 

 diamond, not far from second base, on the naked 

 ground, he showed me a killdeer's nest — a hollow 

 scraped in the gravel, with four eggs which so 

 matched the stones that they had escaped the notice 

 of the players all around them. On the bank of the 

 creek we found song sparrows' nests, and out in a 

 patch of marsh, on the very last tussock, the dried- 

 grass nest of a swamp sparrow, which was much 

 thicker than the song sparrow 's, while the four eggs 

 were of a marbled warm brown and white. 



Then we pushed on, still in the city limits, until 

 we came to an old quarry-bed half -filled with water, 

 which had turned into a noisome bit of marshland. 

 Pushing a rickety raft out through the muck and wa- 

 ter-reeds of the stagnant water, my friend showed me, 

 on a clump of pickerel weed on a sunken stick, a nest 



